Between finishing my Clerical Assistant contract and starting in London in a permanent job, I had a two week hiatus. As I’d paid my National Insurance dues, I went to the Job Centre to sign on as unemployed.
Anyone who has ever had to “sign on” will know, the first question they ask you is “Are you available for work?”. I said yes, but only for two weeks, and she said “Good, that’s how long you’ll be needed.” So it was that I fetched up at a company called Solartron, in Farnborough, as a temporary labourer. Solartron made measurement instruments (it says here, I don’t really remember), but I and another couple of press-ganged youngsters were engaged to move the accounts department from one part of the building to another. This was in the days before desktop computers, so apart from furniture, cabinets, and racking, most of the move involved paper; tons of it.
It was fairly hard work physically, but quite rewarding in getting a specific task completed. It also helped that I could cycle into the factory, and get paid forty pounds a week for my trouble, a fair bit more than my other jobs.
What I learned at Solartron, though, was that there were some very lazy people around, and a couple of people on my crew worked harder at avoiding work than they did actually working. I was quite shocked. Obviously I was still very green at this point, but the sheer audacity of them. Still, it was only two weeks, and I was very happy to be paid more than twice the amount that the unemployment benefit would have paid.
I was ready for “The Big Smoke”.
The Solartron factory is long gone now, all bar a small part of it. The rest is now a new B&Q DIY warehouse.
The only bit of the old Solartron factory remaining. Picture from Google StreetView
While at the Lakeside, I had applied for a job as a Civil Servant in the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS). The posts available were for Clerical Officers, and were at various places in the North Hampshire and South Surrey areas. My shiny new ‘O’ Level passes were a requirement for the job, and I felt pretty confident as I turned up for an interview at Hippodrome House in Aldershot for an interview. My confidence was misplaced.
My problem was that I had never had a sit-down interview before, not even a practice one, so I went in there completely clueless. I was sufficiently aware that I was struggling because even now I can remember the sweat trickling down my back as I stumbled over the questions. If my dad, also a Civil Servant, had coached me a little then I’d forgotten any advice he’d given me, so I crashed and burned. I didn’t get the job.
All was not lost, though, as I was offered a Temporary Clerical Assistant post at the same office in Aldershot, on a six month contract. I gladly accepted, although I hadn’t given enough thought as to how I was going to commute from home.
I pitched up at the Aldershot London Benefits Office, ALBO for short, and started to find out about office work. The office paid short-term benefits to people with London addresses, so we didn’t get too many actual claimants turn up at the door. All the claims came by post, and I very soon found out just how much post when I was sent daily to the Post Room to open mountains of envelopes, stamp, then sort their contents. Every Clerical Assistant (CA) in the place was roped in to do this task daily, and it could take a couple of hours. The bosses were always hurrying us because the rest of the office was waiting on their daily heap of claims and claims documentation.
Had I managed to get the Clerical Officer (CO) job, I’d have been one of the people waiting on that daily mail.
I was assigned to a section of around seven or eight people, and was their clerical support. I filed, I found forms, I put letters in envelopes, and just about every other clerical task you can think of. It wasn’t demanding work, nor did it require a great deal of brain power, especially when tasked with filing papers in the hundreds of thousand of paper files that were stored in the open plan office.
The job paid thirty pounds a week, after deductions, and it came in the form of a Giro Cheque on a government account, which I had to cash each Thursday at the Post Office.
As I found out at the Lakeside, the repetitive nature of the work was a killer, and after about four months I was bored rigid. That said, six months wasn’t a lifetime and I felt that it would be a waste to give up the thirty pounds each week without having found another job first, so I stuck at it. I did at least get to experience an office environment, some great teamwork, and I met a few very nice people there.
The travel to and from home was an issue. There was a bus from Farnborough, but it was the best part of a two mile walk to the bus stop from our house, much of it on a fairly busy road without pavements (sidewalks), which was not great during those winter months I worked in Aldershot. My dad gave me a lift to the bus sometimes, but I always had to walk back, so it was never ideal. Now I was earning, though, I decided to get myself some wheels, and bought a 70cc motorbike, with the help of a loan from my parents. That was great while it lasted, but I managed to write the bike off of an accident after a couple of months of ownership, not my fault I hasten to add, so I was back to the bus. That was until one of my co-workers took pity on me and gave me a lift each day, to and from where I would have caught the bus. She demanded a fee, rightly so, but kept it a wee bit below the bus fare. I still had the walk, but as the evenings were getting lighter, it wasn’t so bad.
With the end of my contract looming, I started to look for other jobs, and this time was successful in getting a Clerical Officer post in the Ministry of Defence (MoD). While there were plenty of MoD places close to where I lived, the job I was offered was in London, which meant leaving the safety of home. I was young and stupid, so off I went into the wild blue yonder.
The little card I’d picked from the rack in the Job Centre was for a labourer to work at the Lakeside Club in Frimley Green. The job paid sixty-five pence an hour and was a good half-an-hour bicycle ride from home, but I accepted the job and started to earn a living.
The Lakeside Country Club was a nightclub in the sense that it only operated in the evening and in the night. There was a central stage, a dance floor, and on three side of that, tables, chairs and booths. At the back of the club was ranged a number of bars, and behind them, the kitchens. If you’re British and into darts, then you’ll know the Lakeside as it was home to the darts world championship for many years. When I was there, though, it was dinner and cabaret six nights a week. Not for me the nightlife, though, I was strictly a day-time worker.
The first thing I had to do was to negotiate the time clock, something I’d only ever seen in films. Punching time in and time out on a piece of card, for pay purposes I was told, but it was also a management tool for attendance. I was assigned to work with a man who looked like he should have retired years before, but he was sympathetic to a greenhorn like me, and directed me to do my daily tasks, the primary one being vacuuming the whole darned place! My memory is a little hazy now, and I can’t believe that I did that, day-in-day out. I do remember sitting out in the yard behind the bars, sorting empty drinks bottles into their respective crates. Completion of that task was the ultimate in job satisfaction, from the chaos of the bottle bins to the tidiness of the crates. It wasn’t, though, intellectually stimulating, which is why I didn’t stick the job very long; I needed to get a better job.
While that employment instilled a little of the idea that I was going to have to work if I wanted to live, its regularity was an eye-opener, having to do the same tasks every day, week after week. School had not prepared me for this, but I knew there would be better.
Some years after I left, the original Lakeside had a fire and the entire place was rebuilt with accommodation, pool, sauna, and the rest. The darts world championship only arrived after the rebuild.
Now a few years into retirement, I felt I wanted to document my working life. It isn’t a thrilling tale, but its level of excitement is not important because it’s more for my benefit than anyone else’s, and I know what’s coming next.
It’s not one long tome, thank goodness, as I’ll split it into sections, and the first one has to be the introduction.
I left school in 1976, halfway through my two-year A-Level courses. That was partly because I was fed up with school and wanted to earn my own money, but also partly because my first year had been completed at a British Families Education Service school in what was then West Germany, but my Civil Servant dad had been posted back to the UK and, try as I might, I couldn’t get him to pull the right strings to allow me to stay in Germany for the second year, even though it would have been possible. My dad’s new posting was in Surrey, but he snagged us a Government-owned house close to Farnborough in Hampshire. The local sixth-form college ran a different A-Level syllabus, which would have required me to start my first year over again. For someone already done with school, I opted for the world of work.
Now is the time for regret. I really really should have completed my A-Levels, then tried for university. Not only would that have opened a lot of doors for me, but university education was free then. But I knew best, and now I really wish I hadn’t.
Back in 1976, the work situation for young people wasn’t as dire as it is today, so I had a fairly broad range of work to choose from, even without A-Levels or a degree. I knew I wanted to work in the public sector somewhere, so that I wasn’t helping to make obscene profits for the Robber Barons – I was a socialist at heart even then. My first disappointment, though, was going to the Job Centre to sign on, only to find that I couldn’t get Unemployment Benefit as I hadn’t paid any contributions, which I suppose was fair. I did, though, browse the jobs on offer and opted to apply for a labouring position while I set to and applied for the Civil Service.
I was at the bottom of the greasy pole that is the world of paid employment.
