A temporary life

It was early 1972 and I'd just quit my job at Olympia. The next day I wandered down to Hammersmith Broadway and went into an employment agency to register. I quite fancied a couple of days off to mooch around and maybe visit some friends in the Cotswolds, but it was not to be. I left my details and went back to my bedsit. I'd been back an hour and the doorbell rang. It was someone from the agency to say that they had a temp job and they needed me urgently. I went back to the agency and was sent off to do some temporary work in an office block in Victoria.
It seems incredible looking back, but there was full employment in the late 60s/early 70s. If you were a shop, office or factory worker in London, it was quite possible to quit one job and walk next door and get another within the hour.
I went on a couple of assignments with the agency that week. Two days later they fixed me up with an interview at Telfers and I started there the following Monday. Time out of work- half a day.
I worked a day or two at the Gas Board accounts dept. They had fallen behind dealing with customer queries so they got temporary staff in to clear the backlog. It was impossible for a temporary worker who'd undergone all of ten minutes induction to make head or tail of the job. I shuffled papers on my desk and alternated between staring out of the window and going to the men's room until the end of the day. I never did understand what I was supposed to do at the office in Victoria either. I just picked up a piece of paper and wandered around trying to look busy. Nobody asked me what I was doing, so I carried on until the end of the day, had my card signed and went home.

I went back to temporary work in the mid 1990s. For about four years I did anything and everything. I parked vans, delivered charity bags and made house to house collections, prepared new cars for delivery to the dealers, and delivered stationery to schools in a 7 1/2 ton lorry. I also delivered furniture and even made bombproof security doors. I packed chocolate, made all sorts of bread and rolls including several million hot cross buns and even walked around a landfill site picking up litter. I enjoyed that one, except that my DMs finally started leaking. I'd walked mile upon mile in them, trudging around the streets of Hereford and Colchester, delivering charity bags.
If there was work going I'd do it. I packed dog food in an open sided shed when it was snowing outside. It was either do that or not work at all. I worked in a leather belt factory, cutting the belts from the hides. I worked for the Environment Agency, plotting the flood defences on the Rivers Nene and Welland on the national computer. I typed up witness statements and collated evidence. I entered data on spreadsheets. I worked as a kitchen porter and washer upper. And I sold tickets to the 1998 World Cup from a call centre.
Call centres. I worked in a few of them. They need a chapter on their own.

Dossers and slappers

After reading my last post I realised that that was the second time in my life that I'd left a job without having another one to go to. It got me thinking about my time at Olympia.
I started working in around November 1970 in an upstairs office overlooking the service yard. At that time Olympia hosted all the major trade exhibitions including the Ideal Home Exhibition. In all I spent about eighteen months there. Most shows took a week or so to set up, then the show itself for four or five days followed by another week pulling the stands down. There was a small core of staff augmented by casual staff when the shows were running.

There were still doss houses (a place where homeless people can sleep for the night. Provided either by the local council, or by a charity organisation)in London in the late sixties/early seventies. There was one just down the road in Hammersmith and the "residents" would queue up for work when we had a show. The firm would pay wages each day in cash, as it was by no means certain that the worker would turn up two days running. The men would be employed as porters and would be paid a pittance and get a meal in the staff canteen. It was just possible to earn enough to stay in the doss house by alternating between Olympia and Earls Court.
They'd stand in line each morning, nursing hangovers and giving false names to the personnel department. If they were lucky to be employed that day they'd dissappear into the labyrinth of tunnels under the halls and do just enough work to keep out of trouble.
I recall one regular. He'd alternate between pulling a rag and bone cart around the streets in the summer and pushing a barrow delivering goods to the dry goods store in the winter. He was loud and uncomplicated. He claimed he couldn't read or write, yet understood enough to be able to do the horses every day (reading the horse's names and the odds) and play darts very skilfully (subtracting his score and working out his next dart in his head).
I remember another kitchen porter who worked full time. He must have been approaching retirement age and may have been gay. (This was only a few years after homosexuality had been legalised). He kept himself to himself. I only spoke to him once and he told me how much he loved his job, because this was one of the last places in London where he could wash up by hand, with his hands in soapy water, rather than using the now universal dishwashers.
Ah well, it takes all sorts and I've met most of them.

I did a spell as a kitchen porter a dozen or so years ago when there was nothing else going, and I was glad to have had a dishwasher for the plates, cups and cutlery. The pots and pans were buggers to keep clean (and to get clean in the first place). Months of sloppy cleaning had left them encrusted with grease and dirt, and don't ask about the deep fat fryer!
(I sound like Kim Woodburn don't I)

As well as the itinerant tramps and dossers we had a fair sprinkling of foreign students, mostly commonwealth but a few from France. At one point we had two Canadians, one in the payroll department and the other in the winestore. Both were travelling around Europe and had arrived at Olympia at different times and from different European destinations. It turned out that they were from the same town, same university and had never met until I introduced them. Earls Court was like a magnet for Aussies and South Africans so we had a few of those working there as well.
On the female side, we had a lot of university students, girls coming from Europe to learn English and old gals waitressing for pin money. It was quite a mix.
I got to know one or two of the younger ones very intimately.

After a few months of almost terminal boredom trying to sort out the dockets for the accounts department, the storeman walked out just before the start of a show. I thought I'd give it a go and for the next few months was responsible for ordering all the bread, milk, cheese, coffee and all the dry and tinned goods.
I also learned how to cut cheese from a wheel of cheddar and make butter pats and curls using a grooved wooden bat and a marble slab. It's harder than it sounds.

The problem with the job was its start stop nature. Any fresh ground coffee left in stock at the end of a show would be out of date before the next show started. I lacked the experience to judge how much or little of a product to order and there were no records to look at. Once again I had no training and was left to muddle on. I stayed for one year and after the Ideal Homes Exhibition handed my notice in.

Working underground made one appreciate the sunshine. I remember leaving for work in the morning when it was still dark, working underground all day and then coming home at night in darkness. It was a strange experience for a country boy.
I'm glad I did it. It kept me busy during the days and paid enough for my rent and beer money in the evenings when I was out playing with the folk group. And I met some nice people. I also got to look around all the trade shows, car shows and Ideal Home Exhibition for free.
The doss house was closed in the early 70s and a swanky new hotel built on the site.
I have no idea whether the business continued to lose money. I was out of there.

The next day I signed up with an employment agency and looked forward to a few days off. Fat chance.

Management part one

After a few months at the factory in Northampton I moved from production planning and took a job in the factory. I was the manager of one of the rooms in the factory, responsible for scotch egg and saveloy production and packing. I was in my mid twenties, more interested in making a success of my rock band, and without any training for the job I had to do.
I was an abject failure.

When we all relocated from London to Northampton to work in the factory we tended to cling together for friendship and support. There was a distinct barrier between the incomers and the locals, partly fuelled by the fact that we'd been given brand new houses by the Development Corporation and that we were generally earning London wages rather than the local rates, which were a lot lower.
The new factory was very spacious, with big open plan offices and a coffee lounge just for the office staff and management. We'd sit in there and talk about how much they had to drink the night before, and who was shagging who. We'd talk about how much work had to be done, but we never actually did much.
The factory staff just got and did more or less what they liked. I was very green, very anxious to be liked and to be everyone's friend, and consequently a pushover.
I had no authority and wouldn't know what to do with it anyway.

We never once hit our production targets and the quality of product was poor. But this was 1975, so it was OK. The unions ran the country and there was a crazy pay scheme in place where we got a wage raise if inflation reached a certain point. My wages increased almost every week, but our output didn't.
It was a train wreck in slow motion and I didn't know how to avert it.

So we sat in the coffee lounge when we should have been trying to get the factory working and we mouthed platitudes about how it would take about five years before the factory was running to its full capacity. And all the time the firm was leaking money like a seive and losing customers daily.

I was a fish out of water and totally unsuited to the job. I was more interested in my music and fraternising with the young female staff (naughty boy!)
And so after less than a year I left for pastures new.
And I didn't know what or where that was.

Sausages, saveloys and burgers

Sausages, saveloys and burgers. We eat loads of them without once thinking about what goes into them. If you don't wish to know then stop reading this.

The first thing you need to know is that the legal definition of beef is everything that comes off a cow's carcass. When you bite into a big mac that you paid 99p for you are not buying into minced steak. That burger probably cost 5p to make. It probably cost more to transport the burger to the shop than it did to make it.

If it's off a cow and is at all edible, it'll be used in food production. When I made burgers the gristle and cartilages were cooked in a big vat and allowed to congeal.Then they were run through a mincer and added to the recipe as part of the meat content. Since then they've got even cleverer and can now remove every trace of anything remotely edible from the bones and turn it into food.

The next thing you need to learn is that burgers, sausages, scotch eggs etc are all produced by squirting the meat out of a machine. In order to get the meat to go through the machine the structure of the meat has to be destroyed. It is turned into a slurry that may only be 30% meat. The rest is soya and rusk, with additives to improve the flavour, hold the product together when it's cooking and some vitamins.
As Crocodile Dundee said "It tastes like shit but it'll keep you alive."

It's quite a sight to see a burger machine stamping out the patties on to the conveyor belt. In our factory the belt went through a freezer so that the burgers were frozen within minutes of being produced. The ingredients were mixed in a large drum according to a finely worked out recipe. We produced several grades of burger with different ingredients. If a modern day big mac style burger is considered the top of the range, I shudder to think what goes in the cheap range that you see in Chav City (the shop that has slebs advertising party nibbles)

We also made scotch eggs. They were quite labour intensive. We had an egg boiler, a machine that you loaded with fresh eggs at one eggs and boiled eggs came out of the other. Someone had to peel the shells off the eggs and keep up with the machine. I used to be able to peel an egg one handed, one in each hand.

The outer covering of the scotch egg was extruded as a flat round patty and as it travelled along the belt someone would place an egg on the patty. Then a girl would mould the scotch egg by hand and place it back on the belt. You'd need six or eight girls to do that. At the end of the belt the egg would pass through a batter curtain and drop into a tank full of breadcrumbs. The eggs would rotate as they climbed up another belt and be covered with crumb. Then they would drop into a conveyor fryer. When they emerged at the other end they'd be placed in trays to cool down before they were packed. That's a fairly standard way of producing food.
When I worked at the bakery, the method of making rolls was virtually identical. We even had a conveyor oven as well as several turntable ovens. I still have the scars on my arms where a hot baking tray touched my arm as I unloaded the ovens.

Saveloys. When I lived in London they were the after-pub food of choice (much like the kebab is today) and with as fearsome a reputation. My department used to produce them. What went into a saveloy? Do you really want to know?

We used to bake all the pies before they went out to the chip shops. These days most chippies buy frozen pies and cook them as required. Back then there were few freezers, so the chippies would buy them in ready cooked. There was a certain percentage of pies that leaked when they were cooked off and we'd recycle them by mincing them up and including them in the saveloy recipe. The saveloys were extruded from a machine with a piston that forced the slurry out through a tube. The saveloy skins were pigs intestines that came in a huge barrel of salt. It was a horrible job getting the skins out of the barrel, soaking them in cold water to make them pliable and then loading them onto the nozzle. It was quite a skilful job to make saveloys and one that attracted a fair amount of ribald comment from the lads as they watched a woman working a machine with a left hand action that would give a great hand job.
The completed (but still raw) saveloys were then cooked in dye filled tanks. This gave the saveloy its red skin. If a saveloy burst or wasn't up to standard for packing, it was recycled into the next batch of saveloys.

So it was conceivable that there was a tiny tiny fragment in a saveloy that was bake waste, turned nto saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys etc etc.

Needless to say I haven't eaten one since.

Food glorious food

I've had quite a few jobs working in food production. The experience changes you.

I had two summer jobs working in a banana factory. One of the perks was that you could eat as many bananas as you fancied. I fancied a lot. I reckon I ate several pounds of bananas a day when I worked there. After I left I didn't eat another banana for about ten years.

When I moved out of London I worked for a meat products factory, initially in the production planning department. I missed the hustle and bustle of the sales office, and the pace of life in Northampton was very slow compared to London. I got bored very quickly and when a vacancy occured for a department manager in the factory I applied and was taken on.
The first change was that I had to have a haircut. I couldn't get it all in the hairnet. When you work in the food industry you take hygeine seriously. If you don't, here's what can happen.

When I was a schoolboy there was a typhoid outbreak in the UK, caused by the South American factory cooling the corned beef tins in the local river water.
About fifteen years ago there was a huge rise in food poisoning that was traced to a firm passing off condemned chicken meat as fit for human consumption. The meat found its way into meat products all over the UK.
And there are numerous outbreaks of e-coli poisoning that are traced back to bad housekeeping and hygeine.

Then there are the foreign bodies that turn up in food, like this recent instance

http://www.droitwichadvertiser.co.uk/news/local/5010493.Wire_brush_found_in_burger/
" A DROITWICH teenager got more than he bargained for when he bit into a burger - and found a wire cleaning brush inside.
The Chicken Legend burger was bought from McDonald’s in Kidderminster by Janet Stephens and taken home for her son Brett.
But when the 18-year-old tucked into the burger he made a shock discovery.
The pair say the five inch wire bottle brush was running through the chicken part of the burger. "

Hmmm. Not sure about that one. Nor the apocryphal Kentucky fried rat. But I do know of a couple that happened.

When I worked at Olympia the catering firm also had the Wimbledon tennis contract. The sandwiches and scotch eggs were made in the kitchens under Olympia and they took on student labour to do the work. After a day of making sandwich after sandwich, the temptation to be creative became too much. There was the sin of omission, making a sandwich with the smallest possible sliver of ham showing, so the unlucky customer bit into plain bread and butter. Then there was the scotch egg with a ping-pong ball filling.
Ho ho ho how they laughed at that.

When I worked at Telfers sales office there was a tale doing the rounds of a steak and kidney pie handed back to the salesman. The customer had bit into and found a piece of paper. On it were written the words "Help, I am a prisoner at Telfers meat pie factory". I like that one. very creative and destructive at the same time.

I learned the difference between a uniform and an overall. When I worked in a bread factory a few years ago I was told quite bluntly that I had to wear a clean overall every shift. (The fact that there weren't any was neither here nor there).

The reason was that overalls were to be worn not to keep one's clothes clean, but to stop the food getting dirty.

I used to drive past the hospital on the way to and from work and I'd see the staff walking around outside wearing their uniforms, including the green that signifies theatre staff. In the food factory you had to remove your overalls if you left the factory floor for a smoke or to use the toilet, and you had to wash your hands when you went into the production area. If you didn't, you got shouted at by the other workers. We took hygeine seriously. You never saw food production staff walking around the town centre shops in their overalls, but I see plenty of NHS staff in their work clothes.
It's a pity that the NHS isn't run by food industry professionals. If the NHS was regulated as tightly as the food industry it'd be shut down long ago.

Live to work, or work to live

I discovered the joy of making music at about the same time as I started work and except for a six year from 1984 until 1990 when I "retired" from making music to concentrate on raising a family and building a career, they've had almost equal importance in my life.
I've had a couple of "pro" music jobs in recent years, touring the UK. One was a theatre tour playing bass in a Patsy Cline tribute show and another was a tour or northern clubs and festivals with Nicki Gillis, an Australian singer/songwriter. It's interesting working with some professional musicians. Playing music is what they do, is all they do, and in some cases it's all they can do.
My working life has been a bit more varied, but for the most part, music has been very important. In fact, if it wasn't for playing music, either for fun or for pay, I wouldn't have stuck at half the jobs I've done.

I used to attend the free festivals in Hyde park in the late sixties. I saw a lot of good bands there, at the old site next to the Serpentine. The last free gig to be held in that location was when the Rolling Stones played in 1969. I went along but was amazed at the number of people there. There were at least twice as many as usual,and I couldn't get near the front. I couldn't even get to the top of the slope to look down on the stage. I remember the event for two reasons.
The first was hearing King Crimson play during the afternoon. I couldn't see them but they sounded special. They were playing at the Marquee the following weekend so I went to see them there. I was blown away and went back the next week to see them again. Stunning. So good that I contemplated throwing my guitar in the bin. I almost gave up playing. Fow a few days anyway.
The second was meeting a girl who became my first serious girlfriend. I was soon besotted with her and would bunk off work to spend the day with her while her parents were out at work. Naughty boy!
While it was acknowledged that the bank payed badly, the benefits compensated. For instance, you could get a mortgage at a staff rate. I knew a lot of staff who only stayed for that. Then there was the sick pay. If you were ill, as long as you rang in sick before 9.30 you still got paid. Very generous. Especially for a horny teenager who didn't like his job much. I don't know how many times I rang in (or got my mum to ring in) saying I had flu. It was about one day a fortnight by the time I left.

After I left the frozen food company where I was an invoice clerk, I ended up working at Olympia, a big exhibition complex in West London. I had a job working for the company that did the catering, trying to make sense of the accounts. This company was a subsidiary of J Lyons & Co and were losing money hand over fist, according to the accountants. They appointed me to take the chits issued by the various stores scattered around the vast labyrinth of tunnels under the halls, and make some sense out of them.
On the first day the lad who was to teach me what to do got talking and the subject turned to music. He was a drummer and the end result was that we spent all day and every day talking about music. We never did work out a system to track the goods in and out of the site. They continued to lose money.
My new found friend joined my circle of musos and we formed a band and played a few gigs around West London. When we weren't playing or rehearsing we'd go out and watch a band. There was great music every night of the week. In the list of priorities it was music first, girlfriend second, going out with the lads third and the job a distant fourth.
Even when I moved jobs and changed girlfriends (and got married the first time)my priorities hardly changed. I got tired of the prog rockish music I was making, and having seen King Crimson and realising I could never match their musicality I was ready for a change. I'd played a few folk clubs and liked the portable nature of the music (no amps to lug around) so when I visited a different pub near to where I lived and found a full blown traditional Irish session in full swing I was captivated. My favourite band Fairport Convention had just released "Liege & Lief" and folk rock was born. This was new and exciting. I sat in with the band one evening and stayed for nearly two years. Some weeks we played every night. It was great. My day job at Telfers was stimulating, and my evenings were spent in good company making good music all over West London and occasionally venturing out to the country. We played Cambridge folk festival in 1972, although I was too drunk to remember any details.

Girlfriends came and went, but the music was constant. My then girlfriend (later my first wife) and I moved to Northampton in 1974, almost the first thing I did (once I'd got out of commuting to London every day)was to advertise for musicians to join or form a band. Out of the first abortive rehearsals I teamed up with a guitarist called Jack and we formed a rock group called Left Hand Drive.

I was working as a production planner in a food factory. My job was to liaise with the sales office and the warehouse, checking the order requirements with the stock in hand and planning the production runs, ordering the raw materials and packaging, and checking that production targets were achieved. I sat in an office with half a dozen other staff and I hated it. The sales office I'd come from was busy busy busy, with the phones ringing constantly. The planning office was like a morgue in comparison. Two of my colleagues were rugby players and another was a boastful arsehole. I hated it.
I'd much rather be playing music.
After a few months there was a vacancy for a junior production manager in the factory so I asked for a transfer.
And so I entered the world of food production.

Deadlines

Looking back I've realised that the jobs that involved working to tight deadlines gave me the most satisfaction. The best jobs are the ones where you can look back at the end of the day and see how much (or little) you've achieved. They can be looked upon as little victories (or defeats). They make the job more interesting.

I've written in previous posts about the deadlines we worked to in the bank. I also worked to tight deadlines when pricing up invoices at a frozen food company. I've worked at places where deadlines were non-existent or so lax as to be worthless. Those tended to be the jobs I hated. I'd find myself staring out of the window rather than doing my work, and getting bored by the minute.

Is it the protestant work ethic? Does the devil make work for idle hands? Is work actually good for us? I've been unemployed a few times over the years and I have to say I prefer to have a job, even a bad one. Just the act of getting out of bed and going to work gives structure to the day.
Having a job with an easily understood set of objectives set against a structure that has built in deadlines makes the day go quicker. If the working day goes quicker, then the evenings and leisure time come that much quicker too.

In the early seventies I worked inthe sales office at Telfers in Cadby Hall, West London. It was just along from Olympia and within a fifteen minute walk from my flat in Shepherds Bush.
There were three of us responsible for answering the phones and taking orders for pies, sausages and burgers that found their way into almost every chip shop in London, and every works canteen across half the country. Briefly, a customer would ring up and order his requirements for the next day's delivery. Our job was to take his order down, allocate it to the correct van salesman, and ensure that enough product was manufactured in the factories. One factory was in Cadby Hall and the other in Stratford, East London. We'd place a preliminary order by ten in the morning based on previous sales and whether it was raining or not (and other factors, like how much stock we were carrying from the previous day). As the day progressed, the pressure increased. There was a deadline for the customers to ring their order in, and the phone calls got more frantic as the deadline loomed. There was another deadline to order the goods from the factory. In between those times there was half an hour when all the loadsheets and spreadsheets had to be added up and cross balanced. And all done without computers.

The days would fly by. At that time I was playing mandolin in a traditional Irish folk group collective. The lineup of the group fluctuated according to whoever was available, from a basic five piece up to fifteen or so. It was loose and tight at the same time. We played pubs all over West London and at one stage played every night except Mondays, and twice on Sundays, all in different venues. It was great while it lasted.

It ended when Telfers decided to move out of Cadby Hall. The sales depot moved to Isleworth and production to Northampton. I didn't fancy commuting to Isleworth from Shepherds Bush, and there were brand new houses available to anyone who relocated to Northampton.
We were paying £8.50 a week for a grotty two room bedsit with a leaky roof and shared bathroom and no heating. They were offering a brand new three bedroomed terrace house with central heating for the same weekly rental.
No contest.
It was just that the job I took was shite.

Pioneer or settler?

Pioneer or settler? We tend to be one or the other. Most of the previous posts have been more about me than the jobs I've done down the years. I've been looking back on what I did and why I did it, about the choices I made, about my expectations from life.

Most of us look for meaning and identity in our lives. It's a sad fact that many people are indistinguishable from the job they do. If they lose their job, they lose their identity and purpose. If we can't find our identity through our work, then we look for it in other places. How many people do we know who lead double lives? They have their work identity, and a totally different one for the weekends, for their holidays, for their leisure or for their hobby.


I found my identity when working in pioneer mode. Learning new skills, new ventures, breaking new ground, opening new territories. After that, boredom sets in.
I doubt if many people are totally pioneer orientated. We have a little of the settler in us all. We may strike out on our own in search of pastures new, but then we settle down to develop what we've claimed for ourselves.
Looking back, I've always been at my happiest when in pioneer mode. Opening new shops, starting up new factories, developing new concepts, writing staff manuals, training new staff.
I don't know how many new shops I opened during my retail career. At least five as manager, plus others as part of the opening team. I loved the challenge of moving into an empty space and over a week or two seeing the fittings and shelving installed, the staff interviewed and a team put together, the deliveries of stock, the unpacking, checking and stocking the shelves; the training of the staff in the various tasks; the late nights leading up to opening day. The exhilaration of opening day and the sheer hard work needed to overcome the obstacles of getting a new retail outlet bedded in. The variety of the seasons culminating in the frantic pressure of the first Christmas. Sales records set. Then the almost standstill post-christmas when it seems nobody's buying. The re-organisation of the shop layout to improve sales, looking for ways to do things better, quicker, more efficiently. Training your successor and moving on to the next store opening.
I left retail management in 1994 when I was made redundant following a takeover. I'd been with the firm for about five years, eight if you included working for firms that had been absorbed along the way. The industry was changing and I didn't like the way it was going, so I left and never looked back.
Many of today's giant retailers have their roots as market traders. Both Marks & Spencer and Tesco's founders began as barrow boys. Jack Cohen's motto as a barrow boy was "pile it high and sell it cheap", and when he moved from a market stall into his first shop in the 1920s he took his philosophy with him.
The Uk's first supermarket was opened by J Lyons & Co in 1950. When I worked in the sales order office at Henry Telfer's, our offices were just upstairs from the supermarket, just along from Kensington Olympia. Tesco soon followed, opening their first self service shop in St Albans in 1951, and their first supermarket in 1956. Tesco rapidly expanded through a mix of new openings and acquisitions, including a small chain of supermarkets in South London run by Ralph Goldstein. Together with his sons he started up a new venture, a self service drugstore, the first in the UK.  They called it Superdrug and they did everything themselves, buying the goods, stocking the shelves and operating the tills. They were pioneers and I worked for them on two of their pioneering ventures, Superdrug and Volume One Bookshops.

Get a haircut boy!

Let's face it, I get bored. Not all the time, but I will, in time.
I've worked in banks, offices, sales offices, retail, factories, warehouses, food production, driving, call centres. Everywhere and anywhere- except for working with animals and children.
The longest I've spent in any one job is about five years. That would have involved doing the same job for the same firm but in several different locations.
Since I was made redundant from retail management in 1994, I've worked mainly as a temp, except for two jobs where I started as a temp and was taken on as a permanent member. Even then, I've only considered my position as being temporary.
I'm not workshy. I'd rather be working than not working. I can turn my hand to anything. The reason I never pursued a more active musical career was that I disliked the downtime, the time between musical jobs. I also disliked the uncertainty of whether I would be earning or not. The bills always come in on time, but gig money didn't.
And I do have my own comfort zone. I can get comfortable very quickly. And get bored eventually.

"What do you call a guitarist whos girlfriend has left him?"

"Homeless"

That's not me.
Back in the sixties I was always being pulled up about my appearance. In banking it didn't matter how thick you were, as long as you turned up everyday, were never late, kept your hands out of the till, and were smartly turned out. I was OK, except for the last one.

It's just alien to me. Oh I do scrub up OK if I make the effort. It's just such an effort. I'd stay in bed until the last possible moment, not knowing if I had a clean shirt. I'd wear my jeans until they'd moulded to my shape, and then keep wearing them for a few more weeks. And as for my hair....

I hate barbers. As a child I was frogmarched into the barbers by my mother. I'd be sat in on a plank acroos the arms of the barbers chair and she'd order a short back and sides. No matter what the weather was outside. My hair had just grown long enough to protect me from the cold wind, and two minutes later I'd emerge freezing into a howling gale, my neck exposed to the top of my head. I hated haircuts.
Along came the Beatles and all that changed. I styled (ha ha!) my fringe so that it covered my acne (and thereby making it worse) and tried to avoid being noticed by the school prefects who could order you to have a haircut or face detention.
Eventually I was free of the tidiness gestapo and ready to join the world of work. Alas, they were as bad, only you didn't have to stay behind after work and write lines. Why the fuss? It's only hair.

One evening I cut it all off using a pair of kitchen scissors. And they still didn't like it. So I let it grow again. I did visit a hairdressers once. I didn't know how to explain what I wanted so I didn't get it. After a few years my hairstyle evolved into a "short on top, long at the back" sort of extra long mullet. By then I was working in Northampton at the brand new Telfers meat products factory. I had to wear a hairnet in order to go into the factory, and my hair was too long to fit into the net, so I reluctantly cut it back.

A few years later I found a hairdresser I got along with, and in common with Kevin Keegan and countless others, I had a perm. I'd wanted one ever since Eric Clapton had his hair permed as an act of homage to Jimi Hendrix. The lead singer of the folk collective "Captain Swing" that I was a member of had a huge ginger afro. Afros looked cool. I wanted one. It could have been worse. I could have had a mohican. They first came into prominence in the very early sixties, but didn't catch on until it became part of the official punk uniform.

I never had a DA. I was just too young for rock 'n roll.
I never had a mohican. I was too old for punk.
But I had a perm
And a mullet.

When we moved back to Northamptonshire after living in Somerset for three years, a young hairdresser used to call around to our house to cut our hair, and continued to do so for the next twenty years, so my hair was nondescript, except for when I had a no2 crew cut. Just the once. I let my hair grow again after that.

I was asked to help out at my wife's place of work about five years ago. I'm still there. On my first day on reception, I turned up booted and suited, wearing a tie. My boss, like me an aging hippy, looked and asked me not to wear a tie again, as it showed him up.
That's one of the reasons why I'm still there five years later.

On a whim, and just to show that I still have hair to grow, I decided to let my hair grow when on holiday back in 2007. My hairdresser trimmed it a couple of times but I'm letting it grow. There's not much of it but I'm not planning to cut it off just yet. I'll cut it when I want to.
I'm having chemo for leukaemia at the moment. They warned me that I might lose my hair. I haven't so far, so that's all the more reason to keep it. A flag of defiance if you like.
Or a plume of defiance.
Or a ponytail.

Modulus eleven

 

I've been lying in bed thinking about modulus eleven. Why? and what is it, you may ask. I just looked it up on the internet and read through the description and I'm as mystified now as I was forty years ago. It's to do with why your bank account number has those particular numbers, and why bar codes work.

Part of my duties as a junior bank clerk was to allocate account numbers to new accounts.You couldn't just  choose any old number. We had a printout containing the available numbers. I noticed that consecutive account numbers were about eight numbers apart. For instance, if an account number ended in 08, then the next number in the sequence would be 16. Usually.

I was told that the last number in the account number acted as a check number for the whole number. Then they uttered the magic phrase "Modulus eleven".

It meant that if you mis-punched an account number, the machine refused to accept it, which cut down the likelihood of applying a credit or debit to the wrong account, or  consigning a credit to limbo.

I was thinking about this because the last few days I've been trying to describe the work I did as a junior bank clerk all those years ago, and I've now realised that although the cheques went through the clearing house and were somehow sorted into branch order, so that we only received our own cheques, they didn't get posted against the customer's account until the cheque arrived in the branch. And that was our job using a Burroughs punch tape machine.

The keyboard was much as the others that I have described. It was loaded with computer paper, very wide, with guide holes on each side, and faint (feint?) lines printed on the paper to help guide the eye.

The machine would only accept genuine account numbers (modulus eleven again), so we'd set the machine for either debit (cheques), or credits. Everything that was punched in found its way onto the punchtape (the soft copy) or the computer paper (the hard copy).

When punching in a batch of cheques, you'd be given a pile of cheques and a total for the batch. You'd punch in the account number, the cheque number and the amount. All that information was punched into the tape by making holes that could be read by a mechanical reader. 

Many years later I was friends with a man who collected player pianos. The tune to be played was created by making holes in a roll of paper, like this-

Exactly the same idea as computer punch tape, but one hundred years older.

I use computer technology in my recording studio. Some studios "programme" the music using a sequencer. The music roll unwound vertically, but the sequencer unrolls (scrolls) horizontally across the screen

But exactly the same principle.

Anyway, you'd work your way through the batch, get to the end and press the total key. The moment of truth. Did your total match the amount you were given? If it did, you'd start on the next batch. If not, you had to find the error. The machine couldn't be used until the error was cleared.

All this was played out against a strict deadline. You soon got good at machining, and even better at finding errors. That skill stays with you.

Proofreading? No problem.

Batch data entry? Easy peasy.

And modulus eleven? It's still in use today. Without it, bank account numbers wouldn't be secure. Without it, there's be no bar codes. You don't need to know how it works, only that it does.

The genius that is Dilbert!

The genius that is Dilbert!

Machine skills

This was the keypad I learned to use when they sent me away to learn machine skills back in 1968.

 

As you can see, there are a few more keys to use, but it's simple once you know how.

From the left hand side, the first nine columns are for pounds, the next two light coloured columns are for shillings, and the right hand column and a bit are for pence, so you can enter up to £999,999,999-19-11d in one go. Each column has buttons marked 1 to 9.

Operating it is a doddle. press the keys corresponding to the each item you want to add, eg £110-9-6 and pull the lever. repeat as needed and the total is in the little windows at the bottom (shown as white dots in the photo. Sorry but pictures of these ancient machines are hard to find)

The amount can be entered using one finger, but speed comes when you use all your fingers to depress the keys in one movement. It's easy to stretch your hands so that they can cover all the keys. The next thing to learn is to read the amount to be entered as one figure. The human brain can read long combinations of letters and recognise them as words, and it can read long combinations of numbers as well.

So you look at the amount and not at the keyboard. You use the mark on the 5 button to guide your fingers and you see the amount and form the shape of the number and press. The illustration I used is for a mechanical version that needed a crank handle to operate. There were electric versions where you touched the motor bar with your little finger to record the amount. With practice it was amazing how quickly one could list cheques, and the skill never leaves you.

Imagine a mechanical machine that consisted of a keyboard like this-

 

and this keyboard surrounded by an array of metal boxes (you can just make out a couple of them in the picture). Anything up to two dozen different boxes. Each of these boxes has the electro-mechanical equivalent of the operating handle in the earlier machine (see above).

This is an NCR Proof Machine, a noisy, clanking whirring monster of a machine that sorted all the cheques that had been paid in into the different banks. One box for Barclays, another for Lloyds, etc. There were a lot more banks in the 1960s. The Westminster Bank and the National Provincial banks merged to form the Natwest bank in the late 1960s. Many other famous names disappeared at the same time. At the end of the day's business, each bank's cheques were tallied up and sent to the Central clearing house. Each bank would present bundles of cheques and receive cheques back. The cheques physically changed hands. Those cheques were then sorted into branches and sent to each branch to be cleared. That's why it took a week for the cheque to be cleared. Two days to arrive at the drawer's branch, one day to be accepted, two days if it were refused.

So why, in these days of computers and instant transfers, and when cheques no longer have to be presented at the drawing branch, why does it still take a week to clear?

The mechanical Proof machine was something to behold. You knew you'd arrived if you were judged sufficiently skilled to be able to operate it. You needed to be quick and accurate.

Speed and accuracy. Where have I heard that before?

As computers became smaller and more powerful and ways were found to speed up the input at branch level, these machines were phased out. Now the cheque is to be phased out.

And one day, cash will go as well.

School days.

Anyone lucky enough to have had a primary school education prior to 1970 had the best possible start in life. No calculators, no extra subjects to cram into the curriculum at the expense of the basics.
The teachers had time to teach you how to read. You proved that could read by standing up in class and reading from a book. They had time to teach you how to spell. Our fourth year teacher had spelling competitions that were fiercely fought. I recall as a ten year old standing up in class to spell "encyclopaedia". It was competitive. It was fun.
They taught us arithmetic. We had to learn our tables, up to the twelve times tables. By heart. My dad said I had it easy. There was even less pressure on the curriculum in the 1930s, so he had to learn up to the twenty times table. We were taught fractions. We were taught mental arithmetic. Calculators hadn't been invented.
My headmaster at Penpol Primary School in Hayle was a Mr Mitchell. He was a grown up so didn't have a first name. He taught the fifth year, and got us prepared for the eleven plus exam. Out of a class of about thirty, and without classroom assistants, he enabled five of us to pass the eleven plus and go the grammar school. Competition for places was tough. There were less than 200 places for the whole of West Cornwall. Selection was on merit, on how well you did in your exam. You got into grammar school because you were the best.
All through that final year at primary school his motto was "speed and accuracy". But accuracy first, because without accuracy, speed is useless.

I read recently that GCSE examiners are told to mark as correct any mathematics answer that has the right numbers but with the decimal point in the wrong place.
I also read recently about a locum doctor who prescribed ten times the dose of a drug to a patient who subsequently died.
And they don't make the connection.

Before February 1971, the currency in use consisted of pounds, shillings and pence. Twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound, two hundred and forty pennies to the pound.
When I started work at the bank, all staff were expected to be numerate, that is to say, they could add up and take away. Each cashier was responsible for the contents of his till, which he would balance each day. He/she had the use of a tally roll calculator for adding up the "meat ticket" cash slips, but we prided ourselves on our ability to do arithmetic, and to do as much as possible without recourse to machinery.

I left the bank in 1970 and for a few months worked as an invoice clerk for a frozen foods firm. The telesales girls would ring their customers and write the order on an itemised invoice. The Invoice clerks would price the individual lines, add up the invoice and deduct the commission to leave the total at the bottom. There were four of us, working to a deadline, and we'd have hundreds to tally up during the course of a day. We were employed on the basis of our ability to add up. And we were good.
Altogether now-
Take 3 3/4% discount off an invoice for £17-6-4d.

No I can't do it now either. But I could back then. Without recourse to paper and pencil.

Our branch of the bank was busy. We had several large local firms, plus many local shops and department stores. At the close of business, we'd have a pile of cheques a foot high that had to be sent away to the clearing house. Each morning we'd receive a huge pile of cheques that had to be filed into each customer's file. This was called sortaway. Then we'd compile the statements, taking the cheques and paying in slips and arranging them into the order they appeared on the statement. and woe betide if a cheque was mis-sorted. It had to be found.
By the time this was complete, there was a pile of today's work to be done. There was always a deadline to hit. It was pressure. It was fun. From 3.30 when the branch closed the doors until 5.00 it was a rush to balance the tills (to the penny), transfer the cash to the vaults, process all the paying in slips and cheques, punch the data, and bag up the cheques for clearing.
It was fun if you could keep up.
I couldn't.
I used to watch the more experienced staff as they operated the various machines. Their fingers flew over the keys and they never seemed to look at what they were doing. And their work was almost always correct to the penny.
I had to be taught how to do that. So they sent me away for a week to learn. It's a skill that never leaves you. In recent years I've worked from time to time in data entry. I easily passed every assessment, both for speed and for accuracy.
Speed and accuracy. But accuracy first.

GIGO

GIGO is the first rule of computing. It means, garbage in = garbage out. When I joined the bank in 1967 it had been computerising customer accounts for about two years. All the London branches were computer based when I started work.
Computers were big machines that needed tender loving care. 1960s TV shows like the Avengers, the Persuaders or Thunderbirds would portray them as big metal sided boxes with large reels of tape whirring around on the front. The modern mobile phone has more computer power than these monoliths, but they had to start somewhere.
The computers could process data faster than it could be inputted, certainly much faster than a human punch it in. The bank used punch tape to input the data. The branch could input the data throughout the day and transmit the tape via a phone line to the computer in the City.
Here's a picture I found on the internet. I hope the owners don't get too precious about me borrowing it to illustrate this post.

This picture shows the punch tape being loaded onto the first spool. Once loaded, the tape is fed through the reader and on to the second spool. Hit the start button and the machine reads the holes in the tape as binary code and is transmitted down the phone line. At the end of the transmission, the computer tells you if it received everything successfully.

Our branch had one of these terminals, and every day a courier van would arrive at about 5 o'clock with data spools from the sub-branches.These would be transmitted as well. Several (always male) members of staff formed a rota to stay late to transmit this data, and if you were lucky it took an hour. If there were errors in the data, you stayed until you found them, corrected them, and retransmitted the data.

So accuracy was essential.
The first law of computers is garbage in = garbage out.
The first rule of banking is credits must equal debits. Someone pays cheques and cash into their account. The various cheques and cash must add up to the total on the paying slip. That is fundamental and easily understood. Extend the principle so that every paying in slip when added together must equal all the cash received, plus all the cheques received. Simples.
Banks were built on trust. When a customer placed his money with a bank for safe keeping, the last thing he wanted was for the bank to lose sight of it, or be unable to account for every penny. Accuracy and numeracy were absolutely essential. It was the customer's money.

These days it's no longer the customer's money that keeps the bank in business. They keep in business by lending the bank's money to customers who have none. They stopped insisting that every cashier balance his till to the penny every day about thirty years ago.
I was working in retail at the time and each day I'd take the takings to be banked, and collect bags of change for the tills. I spoke to the cashier a week or so after the changeover from individually accountable tills to a system where the tills results were pooled. They never balanced from day one. They never did, ever again. Later again they stopped balancing the tills daily and only balanced them weekly. It might have saved time, I don't know.
What I did know was that numeracy (the ability to add up and take away) was declining alarmingly through the nation. Maybe the banks were forced into pooling the tills through a lack of quality staff.
What I did know was this. Every day, supposedly honest and trustworthy staff were buying their snacks using money from the till. It wasn't much, a few pence, but a principle had been lost.
If credits no longer equalled debits because of a few Mars bars, who made up the difference?

And did those who participated in, or oversaw and colluded with this petty dishonesty ever make their way to the top of the banking industry?

Hi Ho Hi Ho, it's off to work we go

It was September 1967 and I had just landed a job at the Chiswick High Road branch of the Westminster Bank. I was booted and suited and ready to brave the rush hour to get to work.
I was very good at finding my way around London. I used Red Rover bus tickets (a bargain at 3/6d) to explore the capital from the age of 14 or so. As the son of a railway employee, I was entitled to privilege tickets on the London Underground. I could travel anywhere on the Underground system for 6d (2 1/2p), so I sometimes took the train to Uxbridge or Upminster and buy a Green Rover ticket and travel on the London Country buses. It's amazing how far you can travel for less than ten shillings. The Dartford tunnel had just opened, and London Transport had a small fleet of vehicles based on a Ford Thames Trader chassis to take bicycle users through the tunnel. So I used my green rover ticket and travelled south from Grays to Dartford. I think I got as far as Sevenoaks before it was time to head back home again. On another occasion I sampled the delights of bus travel in and around Harlow and Luton, and the experience cured me from wanting to visit either location again.

So I knew my way around London. But I'd never experienced the rush hour. I used to walk the mile and a half to school every day, then back home for lunch, back to school for the afternoon lessons, then maybe cross country running after school before walking home. That's a minimum of six miles walking every day. I was built like a racing snake.

Travelling from North Kensington to Chiswick was fairly straight forward, with the advantage of travelling against the main flow of the rush hour. People took the tube into the city. I took it away from the city, from Ladbroke Grove to Hammersmith. Then it was out of the station and a short walk to the bus stop in King Street, just outside the Hop Poles pub. The bus travelled along King Street to Chiswick High Road, and then it was stay on the bus until the stop opposite the bank.

It was a ten minute walk to the station, then a fifteen minute train ride followed by a fifteen minute bus ride. Less than an hour.
In my time at the bank I discovered a universal truth.
The closer you live to your place of work; the more likely you are to be late.
The last person to sign in each morning lived around the corner.

I worked in Brentford a few years later, by Kew Bridge near the Star & Garter. Although it was only a mile or so further to travel, the extra distance made it harder to get to work. So I'd bunk off and visit my girlfriend instead. But that's another story.

The furthest I travelled to work when I lived in London, was in the early 1970s and I travelled from Shepherds Bush in west London to Stratford in east London. I walked to the Central Line station, grabbed a seat if one was available and stayed put as the train filled to bursting and then was empty for the last part of the journey from Liverpool St to Stratford. I endured that for a month or two, and then moved to Northampton and had to commute from there to Stratford. I really hated that. Luckily it was only for a month or two until the Stratford factory closed and production moved to Northampton. On the whole I dislike commuting, but have travelled up to 50 miles each way by car to work. These days I prefer to live and work in the same town.

I don't remember much about those first commuting journeys. I recall seeing a young lad who was convinced he was James Dean. He had the haircut, the jacket, and the way of sticking his chin in and looking up at you. I stayed well clear. He looked belligerent.
I stayed clear of the man who used to get in the same carriage, take advantage of the crush, and then touch me up all the way to Hammersmith. The cheek! I couldn't even persuade a girl to do that. That was a long way off.

Smartly turned out

I have absolutely no interest in fashion. As far as I'm concerned, clothes should keep me warm or cool according to the season, and be reasonably comfortable. End of.

Part of this is down to my upbringing and the time that I grew up. My mother chose my clothes. They had to be hardwearing and functional. I was the oldest, so I never wore my sibling's cast-offs. I did however wear other people's cast offs if they fit. Growing up in the fifties in a small seaside town, there were no washing machines or launderettes. Clothes had to be washed by hand and wrung out using a pre-war mangle. I had one school shirt when I went to grammar school. I'd wear it all week and it would be washed at the weekend ready to be worn again the next week. When the collar wore out from all the scrubbing, it was either unpicked and turned over and resewn, or a patch was sewn over the frayed material. Clothes were basic and functional and certainly not fashionable. My mother insisted in kitting me out in corduroy jerkin and shorts. I wore shorts until my legs got too hairy. It was the norm.
Clothes were expensive. They were expensive compared to how much I earned. A cheap shirt cost fifteen shillings (75p), a good one was a guinea (£1-1s). A cheap off the peg suit cost £10, which was one week's wages.
I needed a suit to work at the bank. My parents paid for my first suit. It cost £10. My second suit cost a bit more. I went to Burtons for it.

There was a Burtons in every town. I went to the branch in Portobello Road. Their buildings are very distinctive. They always occupied a corner site and they almost always had a snooker hall upstairs. The former Burtons site in Kettering is now an Estate Agents, with a night club upstairs.
I went to Burtons one Saturday and was measured for my suit. He asked me if I dressed to left or to the right. He had to explain what it meant. Then I had to choose the style of suit. Finally I paid a deposit and the suit was ordered for me.
Burtons had a huge factory in Bradford or somewhere like that where they made up the suits that had been ordered in the local shops. A week or two later I called in and tried my suit for size.
It cost me £30, three week's wages.
My next suit was off the peg, and cost £18 from Burtons. I never bought another for years.

Because clothes were expensive you tended to wear clothes until they wore out. The habit tends to stick with you.
In the early 70s I used to wear loon pants. They were made of cotton and were died in bright colours. They cost about £2.50 a pair. A nice grandad tie dye T-shirt cost about the same.
It wasn't until the late eighties that clothes started to come down in price. And as they became cheaper, people began to throw them out before they wore out.

About ten years ago I had a job working for a recycling firm. I'd clock in at six o'clock in the morning at the site in Wellingborough, and together with a driver's mate would drive a white van to the designated collection area. I started off in Colchester, which was about a hundred or so miles away and took about two hours to get to. We'd buy an A-Z map and choose an area to work in. We'd spend the morning walking the streets putting bags through the letterboxes. Our target was 1000 bags per day, assuming we could find 1000 houses that hadn't been visited. After a month or more we'd walked every single street in Colchester and every village within ten miles.
Every afternoon we'd drive to the location that we'd visited two days earlier, this time we drove around looking for the bags that had been left out. Once we'd collected all the bags we drove home, had the van weighed on the weighbridge, emptied the van and clocked out. The next day we did more of the same.
Our target was one ton of clothing per van per day. Some vans went to areas that produced more. Others produced far less. It must have made money, even with all the miles involved.

Some of the clothing was packed into large canvas bags that were sewn shut and loaded in an unsorted state into lorries and transported to eastern Europe, where the clothes were sold to a poor population. This was prior to the enlargement of the EU. Some clothes were sorted into types, eg cotton, silk, wool and went to be recycled. Some customers would order say, a hundred pairs of used denim jeans, or fifty large ladies overcoats and these would be packed and despatched. Clothes that were given away to charity found their way to market stalls in Africa. The Organisation that gave its name and added credibility to the operation received a percentage of the cash raised in this way.

We performed a vital role in the economy. Many people (but not me) love shopping for clothes. Inevitably they run out of storage space. A charity bag would be posted through the letterbox and it would be filled with unwanted or unloved clothes, thereby releasing space for more purchases and keeping the tills ringing in the high street. A small fraction of the clothes collected would find its way into the charity shops of the organisation named on the bag, but it tended to be the very best stuff. Once a week we'd send a van to these retail outlets to take away the unsold clothes and bring fresh stock in. Almost all the clothing collected got reused, resold or recycled.

Until now. The problem is that clothes are now too cheap. I paid £3 for a pair of jeans from Tesco. If prices had risen in line with inflation that would have been around £90 based on 1960s prices. I don't do fashion, I don't do designer labels, I do do comfort,and they're uncomfortable I'll throw them into a charity bag. Most clothes are produced in the far east. Most of them are made from man made fibres, which can't be recycled. Clothes that sell for a pound or two when brand new have no resale value and can't be recycled so go to landfill. Transport costs mean that the foreign markets have dried up. It costs too much to send our unwanted clothes to Africa. The Africans can buy their clothes direct from the factory, as we do.

I stayed with the collection vans for about three months. Inevitably the longs hours took their toll. I was being paid by the hour, so I was earning well enough. However, I was supposed to be a musician and songwriter and while I found that walking the streets was a great way of working out song lyrics ( I wrote one of my favourite songs while tramping the streets of Wivenhoe in Essex), I didn't have any time to get into the studio to record the songs. I wanted to record another album, so in the end I packed the job in.

I'd walked every street in Colchester, Haybridge, Malden, Mersea and all the surrounding villages. I also walked the streets of Hereford and Ross on Wye. I discovered that every new housing development looks the same, irrespective of local architectural styles. Bland bland bland.

Banking for Beginners

I remember September 1967 for two reasons. I started work at the Chiswick High Road branch of the Westminster Bank, and I went to my first "proper" rock concert. It was part of the "Sunday at the Saville" season and the bands at this first show included Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band and to top the bill, Pink Floyd. Other shows I saw included those by Jimi Hendrix, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and Vanilla Fudge.
While waiting for the first house audience to leave, my friend Dave & I stood outside. Dave nudged me in the ribs and in a loud stage whisper pointed out the DJ John Peel leaving the theatre, looking as inscrutable as ever. Finally we took our seats and the curtain rose and the band that started the show sent shivers up and down my spine. They still do more than forty years later. I refer to the magnificent Fairport Convention featuring the awesome playing of Richard Thompson on lead guitar. I was less impressed with Pink Floyd. Their single "See Emily play" had just charted and I expected a pop group, not an hour of psychedelic instrumentals with the band silhouetted on a white backdrop, and a multi-coloured light show making strange shapes on the screen. I went to see them a few more times in the coming months, and repeated listening to "Piper at the gates of dawn" soon got me on their wavelength.

It was a far cry from my day job. Banking was conventional and safe. It was said that it was impossible to get fired from a job in the bank, unless you were caught with your hands in the till, or were consistently late for work in the mornings. You could get a subsidised mortage and drift along until retirement. I met many an old duffer who turned up for work impeccably dressed, punctual to the minute, who did just enough to keep going, who never attempted to excel or even be noticed. Any promotion that came their way was on the "dead man's shoes" principle, plus the fact that the banks were chronically short of good male staff. Men held all the top jobs, and the best a woman could aspire to was to be branch chief cashier in charge of the tills. That was how it was. That was how it had always been.
The branch had about twenty five staff in all. There was the branch manager, an anonymous man who lived in his office and rarely emerged. His assistant manager (not to be confused with the manager's assistant) sat in a raised cubicle overlooking the banking hall. In front of him there were a line of till positions, and to his side and behind him were the staff who processed all the cheques and paying in slips. Other specialist staff occupied areas to the rear of the floor. These included the foreign cashier, the standing orders clerk and the securities officer.
The cashiers sat at their positions with a wide open counter in front of them. There were no security screens (Until a few days after we'd had an armed holdup. More on that later) Everything was as it always had been.
The staff had to be signed in before nine. There was work to be done before the doors opened at 10.00. At 3.30 the doors shut and there was a rush to get everything done before we went at five. If we didn't get finished, we stayed. We used to open on Saturday mornings but that ceased soon after I joined.

We now know that the first computers were built and used at Bletchley Park during the war. The first company to use a computer was J Lyons & Co in the early 50s. It was called Leo and it took up a huge amount of space, being made of valves and resistors. The banks started using computers by about 1965 and so I joined the bank at the dawn of the computer age. In time I would join the team that fed the machine, but first I had to learn a few skills.

The junior staff were responsible for the filing of the customer's cheques each morning. Then they compiled the bank statements that were sent to the customers. Every statement that went to the customer included all his cheques sorted into the order they appeared on the statement. This was time consuming but a useful service. The banks stopped sending cheques with the statement many many years ago. You now have to fight to get your old cheques back.

It's useful at this point to understand how the banking system worked back then. For a start, it's important to know that it was a cash based economy. Everyone was paid in cash. Very few people had a bank account. Even fewer people had the new fangled Barclaycard.
It was cash, cash, cash.
The coinage was big and bulky. Paper money was in ten shilling (50p), one pound, five pound and very rarely ten pound denominations.
Credit was hard to come by. There was hire purchase (shunned by the older generation), and Provident cheques, that could only be spent in certain shops. My mum used Provident cheques to pay for seasonal items like school uniforms and Christmas presents. She'd borrow, say, twenty pounds, get a cheque that could be used in certain local shops, and pay it back at a pound a week over twenty one weeks.

Banks did not lend money to just anyone. Banks were places where you put your money for safe keeping. The bank manager's role was to look after your money and make sure you didn't overspend. If he thought that you were spending more than you earned, he would call you into the office for a chat. If he thought you were a good risk, he might be persuaded to advance you some money against your future earnings. It was always your money that you borrowed. You had to have some money in order to open an account. You opened an account and some time later you'd get a cheque book. Your account was watched carefully to see you didn't go astray.

Sometime during the early 1970s it began to change. Suddenly the bank manager was your friend. You needed some money? Talk to your bank manager. Debt was encouraged. Only it isn't called debt. It's called credit.
During the 1980s I'd walk past banks that advertised the "products" they had on offer inside.
To me a product was something that was a physical entity that had been manufactured, not a savings scheme that promised a bonus upon maturity. The banks had changed from safe places to keep your money, to retail outlets offering bonuses for people with money so that they can lend that money to people who had none, and making profits on the commission.

But in the 1960 it was a cash economy. Everyone paid by cash or cheque. As I said, the cash was bulky and it had to be banked somewhere. Banks had branches in every small village, town, shopping arcade, and market. They issued their customers with leather wallets that could be deposited in the night safe in the wall of the bank. Each morning the cashiers would open the wallets, and count the cash before the branch opened its doors. The amount of cash in circulation was staggering. About 90% of all retail business was paid for in cash. And the local bank needed staff to count the stuff.
Almost all wages were paid in cash. Each Thursday the local firms would telephone a breakdown of the cash they needed for the payroll, broken down to the exact number of pennies and halfpennies. The Chief Cashier would need to make enough cash available for the area's payroll needs, and would order coin and notes from the Bullion Department.
Each week the Bullion van would park outside the bank and we'd help the delivery drivers carry the coin into the bank and down into the vaults. A bag of silver coin weighs about 28lb (from memory) and it was just possible to carry four if you could grip the bags. We had a lot of coin and notes delivered each week.
One week a heavy hessian sack dropped onto the pavement in front of me. I'd been carrying coin and wondered if I should pick it up. There was no-one else around so I picked it up and carried it into the vault. When the van had gone it was opened.
There was £50,000 in new £1and £5 notes in the sack.
At that time my salary was £370 a year, with an extra £150 for working in the London area.
£520 a year.
£10 a week.

The Summer of Love

Ah yes, 1967. By July I'd had enough of school and they'd had enough of me. I managed to get my summer job back at Ffyffes Bananas, and resisted any questions about careers etc. My school friends Andrew Brazier and Dave O'Callaghan both applied for jobs in the bank, so for no other reason than "why not?", I applied too.
The education system of the mid sixties was very stratified. I took and passed my 11 plus exam and went to grammar school. After the first year's internal exams, the brightest 25% were put into an elite stream, who then went on to take their O level exams at the end of the 4th year, rather than the fifth. This meant that the brightest ones had taken their A levels and were on  their way to University by the time they were 17. I'm a big fan of streaming pupils according to their ability. If you keep the bright ones in with the duffers, they get dragged down and never achieve their potential.
By some fluke I found myself in the A stream in the second year, and from then on I struggled to keep up. I managed to pass five O levels at the end of the fourth year, but this wasn't enough to get a place in the sixth form, so I stayed another year in the upper fifth, passed another O level and called it a day.
My grammar school was all male. There was a girls school next door and we'd spend the breaktimes shouting obscenities through the fence. My experience of girls was nil when I left school. I could, however, blush for England. I was a lanky spotty youth who was awkward, always in trouble for having long hair, and a dreamer. I'd just learnt how to play the guitar and it was my consuming passion.
So why did I opt for a career in the bank?
My parents had both passed their 11 plus exams, but grammar schools were fee paying in the 1930s, so they couldn't go. My father had to go out to work at the age of 14, and there was a lot of pressure from my parents to get a proper job. Playing music was not a proper job, despite the fortunes that could be made then.
The careers that were open to grammar school educated teenagers with average O level results were, commerce, banking or the civil service. I answered three adverts in the paper and went for  interviews.
The first was at Thomas Cook. It was a grim place. I was interviewed by two grim people. They asked me why I wanted to work for them. They told me that whistling wasn't allowed in the corridors, and that all male staff had to wear grey suits with either white or grey shirts. And a plain tie.
And this was the summer of love.Kaftans, flowers in your hair, cowbells as necklaces.

My next interview was with the civil service. I can't remember much about it. Basically, if you turned up every day, stayed out of trouble and turned in an above mediocre performance, you had a job for life. The only sacking offence was consistent lateness.
Next.

My next interview was with the Westminster Bank. It was like the other two, but paid better.

And so it was, that on September 29th 1967, I turned up for work at the Chiswick High Road branch of the Westminster Bank.

Welcome to the rest of your life. As if.

Way back when

Welcome to my new "been there done that" blog. As I get older and increasingly grumpy, I start to sound like my old man, with one exception- he left school at 14 and worked delivering coal in 56lb sacks, before getting a job on the Great Western Railway, just prior to nationalisation in 1947. He stayed with the railway all his working life, progressing from cleaner to fireman and then to engine driver. He was driving High Speed Trains when he contacted cancer and died in 1984. His story is typical, where a man would join a company and stay there throughout his working life.

Not today. And not in my case.

I can remember a familiar conversation when I was a boy. "And what are you going to be when you grow up?" I didn't know. I still don't. My father was adamant that I shouldn't join the railway and be an engine driver. I was a grammar school boy and more was expected of me. I had to get a proper job. But what job?

My first introduction to the world of work was in Hayle, Cornwall as a boy aged about ten. There was a farm next to our estate (council housing estate,that is) and one year my mother and a load of local women were offered work picking potatoes. Being the eldest, I was brought along as well. It wasn't hard work. The farmer drove his tractor fitted with a sort of pronged wheel device down the field, and lifted the potatoes. We then bent down and picked the potatoes and placed them in boxes. We had to move quickly because he'd turn around and lift the next row within a minute or two. I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed the challenge of picking every potato before the farmer returned. My friends were happier mucking about and throwing stones, but I got stuck in. At the end of the day I received 2/6d (12 1/2p), except that my mother took it to help with the housekeeping. My stone throwing friends also got 2/6d.

A few years later we lived in London, just off Ladbroke Grove. This was in late1962 and there were no supermarkets, just small grocers and corner shops. My mother heard that the local grocer needed someone to stack shelves so I went to work there after school. I recall seeing a pack of Persil on the store room shelf. It was out of date because it had the slogan "Persil 62- new as 1962". It boasted better cleaning power than ever before and promised that your whites would be whiter than white. Nothing changes, only the label.
The grocer also had a milk round, so I worked the round for a while. I was 14 and used to operate the milk float along Ladbroke Grove and the side streets in the early morning. It had a tiller with a button to switch on the motor. I'd park it on the side of the road and load up my 12 bottle milk crate and deliver milk to the various blocks of flats, running up and down the stairs. The crate was heavy and the stairs were steep, and some of the old tenements opposite Kensal Green gasworks were dark and smelly, without lighting on the stairs. I'd also have to go out on a Saturday morning and collect the money. I think I earned about 5shillings a week and it went into the family housekeeping fund.

Some time later I got a job in an off-licence on Harrow Road, near the junction with Elgin Avenue. I'd have to fill the shelves, help with the deliveries into the shop, and deliver wines and beers to customers in the area. I was 15 and too young to serve the customers, but it was a challenge to keep the bins filled, bottles dusted and faced up. Working at the off-licence cured me of Christmas, as I worked there one Christmas Day, and it was just another day. I've disliked Christmas ever since.

My only other job as a student was when I worked at Ffyffes Bananas, back when the bananas were imported on stalks and ripened and cut to order. This was in 1966/7. The process was very labout intensive. I did various jobs, loading wooden banana boxes on to a conveyor, ready for the cutters to fill them, unloading railway wagons packed full of green bananas, hooking them via chains to the overhead conveyor belt that wound around the factory. Another job involved stripping the paper from the banana bunches as they passed. If you were lucky, you could catch the paper just right and debag the bunch with one movement, If you were unlucky, you got green banana skin under your fingernails and that hurt. The belt moved very quickly and you soon found yourself waist deep in paper and plastic. Woe betide if there was a fire. There was no way out. When the bananas were unloaded, you'd bail up the paper and plastic, and then you'd discover how many spiders and cockroaches had made their journey across the Atlantic. The mostly West Indian workforce didn't worry about the big green hairy spiders with big feet. Tree spiders are harmless. Not so the little Black Widow spiders, or the occasional snake that had survived the journey. Every now and then you'd hear a commotion as they dealt with the intruder.
I learned a lot about worker relations at this job. We had no rights. There's the door and there were plenty more looking for work. Sick pay? None. Holiday pay? Just the basic wage. I asked the Jamaicans where they went for their holidays. Nowhere. No-one could afford holidays abroad and the sight of a black face or body on an English beach was a rarity. I only ever met one black person in the thirteen tears I lived in Cornwall.
I learned a lot about race relations. This was only a few years after the Notting Hill race riots that took place about a mile away from where I lived. I was a hick from the sticks so I emphasised with the black immigrants and tried to treat them as equals. Whether they noticed or reciprocated I don't know, but I was very surprised to hear the black West Indians call the black Africans highly racist and discriminatory names. The racism was between black and black. The Jamaicans called the Nigerians monkeys who didn't know how to use a toilet properly and would make monkey noises at them. I learned that racism has nothing to do with skin colour, and I believe that still holds true today.
In the summer of 1967 I got a holiday job at Fffyffes, this time in the office. I had to record the sales figures do other admin jobs. I'd arrive at work at 8.00 and be done by 9.30. I never did learn how to make a job last all day. I was bored, but I was being paid 2/6d an hour, which was better than the 2/6d a day I earned picking potatoes. That was £1 a day, £5 a week. £250 a year. And all the bananas you could eat. I ate a lot. I mean a lot. Five or six very ripe speckled bananas at a time. All day, every day. It was almost twenty years before I ate another. This was the "Summer of Love" and I'd just learned to play the guitar. My head was full of hippy music.

I'd taken my GCE O levels in 1966 and passed five. I still didn't know what I wanted to do, so did nothing. Five O levels was only average that year, so my half hearted attempt to gain a sixth form place was turned down. I decided to join the upper fifth and take some more O levels. One year later and I'd gained an O level in English Literature and an improved grade in German to go with my other passes, (French, English language, Geography, Latin and German) so I now had six O levels and no desire to continue my education. I was bored. I'd had enough, and my school had had enough of me. Not quite rebellious, just a pain. A long haired spotty dreamer.

So the world of work awaited me. What would I do?