Jobs we had as kids

They were packed so you could pop one in a fitting without taking the box off.

Born and grew up in Brum. Left school at 15 in 1956, teachers nagged the life out of me to take 11 plus but for some strange reason did not want to go to grammar school. Did paper round before I left school and then hopped on a number 44 bus to run errands for my nan, (opposite Tyseley engine sheds) strange foods like chitterlings, faggots and peas (red hot much burning of hand) pigs trotters etc.

Bus conducter sang and whistled his way along the route shouting out all the stops.

Can still smell the workers from Rover, Girling brakes, Dawes cycles, King Dick tools all in that Tyseley area (suds oil) and Smiths crisps cooking fat at the bus stop queue.

Intended to go into the motor industry so wrote off for an apprenticeship to 'The Rover', where my dad and grandad and lots of uncles worked. Unfortunately (at the time) as I had left school at Christmas they had filled their allocation. Went to Alldays and Onions, ( must have some premonition of the demise of the motor industry) fan and foundry equipment manufacturers as an apprentice. Good old fashioned apprenticeship, went to tech and got HNC. Sometimes wonder if I should have gone to grammar school and Uni but at the same time cherish my days on the shop floor before going into the drawing office then tech sales and finally as engineering director. (not with Alldays but still in the fan industry) The fact was that in my working class environment I did not know of anyone that went to uni.

Many great memories of my teens, (you don't worry about all the stuff that gets up my nose now)

Rock and roll, Brum was amazing for that, so many groups (bands were those people that played old dance music then) every pub, dance hall, school halls, community centres, working mens clubs (tone it down a bit lads) had rock groups on. And of course the smogs, you could chew it, thankfully long since gone. Oh and I remember Brum was, I believe, the first city to introduce dim/dip lighting on vehicles.

That was then, now living in rural Somerset, Brum not to my taste now.

Bill D.

When I was about 14 I desperately wanted to buy a secondhand Rollieflex camera for £25 but because it was German and high class it was made plain that I would never be able to aquire it..however, this did not stop me scraping every penny that i could earn in the hope that I would eventually be able to buy it.....

The area was poorish and there were no supermarket shelves to fill then so I eventually started working on Saturdays for the local blacksmith who had been an army farrier in WW1. His forge was a nice Victorian building but the 'fire' took up most of the tiny space where the work happened. I quickly discovered that this was because most of the building was crammed full of ash from decades of use...he simply raked out the fire and tossed the ash and muck over his shoulder! Also, I learned that there was no electricity in the forge as he did not see the need!.....not when he could get a lad to provide the power, and that was where I came in! In the centre of the dark gloom of the forge was a bright circular object that turned out to be a steel ring polished by countless hands over the decades. This ring and the blackened chain above it powered the air to the fire and pulling the ring for 6 hours on a Saturday was almost beyond me as a 14 year old boy.....I used to leave the forge and stagger thru the village more dead than alive.

Teh pay was dismal at "one and six" for a days graft and even I realised that the camera was not really in the frame. However, years later I came to see that I was paid handsomely for my time in that sweltering black dungeon. The 'boss' was frequently the worse for drink and also rabidly left-wing, but when sober was a charming skillfull craftsman who enjoyed teaching his magic to a wide-eyed youngster. Everything was accomplished by the heat of the fire and athletic physicality and it was assumed that I, being much younger, would have no problems matching the sheer physical effort and vigour which were his real stock in trade....no allowances were made for smaller muscles or lesser years.....on one Saturday we 'struck' holes around iron gates to attach chicken wire...my job to support the gate as it was passed thru the fire and the holes made with a single hammer strike. When I could no longer hold the hot gate the boss was forced to search for a copy of the Daily Mirror for me to hold the hot metal with!

I learned many diverse skills from that blacksmith, not all about making things from metal but about the world in general and about people and their hopes and fears, and above all about the trials and tribulations of working with a true eccentric from a bygone age.....

A good chance the forge hearth and bellows were Alldays & Onions.

Still see some in rural museums etc. There is an A&O pneumatic hammer at the Iron bridge museums.

Bill D.

The reciprocating bellow were indeed made by Alldays & Onions and were decorated by lillies of the valley cast into the frames........frequently the power of the air would suddenly lapse and this was because the leather of the bellow was basically rotten with age......at such times the blacksmith would dissappear behind the fire and after some swearing and clattering the air supply would be resumed. I eventually discovered that he would cut pieces off of his leather apron and sew them over the holes in the bellows using garden twine and a large needle.......

Edited By Bob Stevenson on 08/09/2020 19:23:22

Had a succession of jobs when at school, remember one particular summer, during the holidays, when I was 15 had a job at grocers shop. In those days grocers used to sell bacon which came as a whole side of pig and had to be boned out and cut into manageable pieces that would fit onto the bacon slicer. The grocer showed me once how to do it and from there on it was my job whenever the sides of bacon were delivered, the knives used were scarily sharp, nowadays H&S would have a field day with a 15 year old using such knives without supervision and any personal protection but things were certainly different in the early 60’s. I had another good job when I was 16, Assistant stage manager at the theatre on the end of the pier in Eastbourne, only for the duration of the Easter show though, made up for by the fact that there was a troupe of dancing girls performing in the show. At 17 I left home and joined the RAF, I think my weekly pay then was £3. 3 shillings, life in the Air Force was a completely different experience which lasted 22 years and changed my life for various reasons.
Dave W

Some wonderful stories here that strike a chord. The one common theme though is how these experiences have shaped lives and developed characters. Many of those experiences are not available to the youth of today and you have to wonder is that a positive or negative change.

Paul.

1966 paper round, up at 5am two hours to complete, good pocket money at the time, 1968 apprenticeship with British rail Doncaster plant works just missed being taken as an apprentice electrician, only six out of 84 I was seventh, not to worry after a month one of the apprentice electricians left to join HM Forces and I moved into the "cream" of apprentices, 1969 awarded apprentice of the year and awarded a £3 premium bond prize (which I still have) and it's still worth £3, fantastic! left BR in 1979 to join Crompton Parkinson Doncaster motor division because there were lots of lovely ladies working there on the production lines, went to university of Derby to gain a BSc in Igneous & metamorphic petrology at the age of 50, finished up for the last 15 years as site Electrical Engineer for Bombardier Transportation Derby and retired two years ago, apart from that it's been a little quiet but not boring.

Gren.

Ah yes, lovely ladies, the typing pool in the mini dress era.

If someone had told me then that in the future I would be doing my own typing rather than having a short hand typist i would have said they were mad. What was someone saying about change for better or worse?

Still I did marry one of those typists at Alldays, still going strong.

Bill D.

Another Brummie - my first job, aged 16, was at the long defunct Chas Clifford non ferrous metal foundry. 10 quid a week I got for analysing the metal coming from the tundishes and making sure it had as little copper in it as permitted by the standard. I'd shacked up with my girlfriend - rent for our flat was £3 a week. Ee, them were the days!

When the lab got an X-ray fluorescence machine I was trained to face off the raw samples from the furnaces using a mill - training was 'put it in the vice, tighten up then turn this handle'. No PPE, somehow I survived.

Robin.

Edited By Robin Graham on 09/09/2020 00:50:33

I was one of the last intakes in the late 70s for the merchant navy which got me going for the first 7 years and knocked the edges off me and set me up for a working life

Government helping-hand-up money got most youngsters going and made them feel useful in a myriad of industries until Maggie demolished the entire system in the 1980s

The only big system left from the old days which creates useful people from government cash is the NHS.

Tthings are far more shaky and temporary nowadays for most youngsters, income is either loads-of-munney or almost-no-munny instead of a broad basic income across the community, polarising society like in the USA and generating things like Brexit

Changed days, and not for a better society IMO

I forgot to mention that many of my local peers were into drugs. I remember the names blues and bennies and was horrified after what I saw the effects that they had on them.

This was a pity as they were pretty good kids to grow up with but come 15-16 the dealers got their hooks into them.

My late dear mum once remarked I did not get sucked in because I was too busy building model aeroplanes and working. Very astute mum. A few of them died of heroin overdoses before reaching 18.

Also managed to fit in 4 years at the Army Cadets (the annual camps were my holidays), and learned many useful skills (map-reading, rafting and rifle shooting) among others.

Nowadays I notice a lot of 'umbrella kids', sheltered from the big cruel world by overprotective parents, left alone with Facebook imaginary friends and totally unprepared for the real world. A local teenager was run over while chasing an imaginary 'Pokemon' with his mobile phone, very sad.

Age 11 onwards made a go kart the peddle youself type and would go to Weymouth railway station and take grockles suitcases to their hotels,worked in the Jubilee cafe then Pullingers restaurant on the Pier bandstand,at 15 passed exam to enter Royal Navy as an Artificer Apprentice and trained as a Shipwright passing out in 1964, seems a million years ago

Mick🇫🇴

Very gratifying that there is a fair sprinkling of ex-Brummies contributing to this thread. I myself was born and bred in Smethwick, just to the north of, and bordering on, Birmingham. Amazing amount of metal working industries in the borough then and all gone now. I remember as a small boy in the long summer school holidays spending hours standing at the open door of the local drop forgings watching the manufacture of crankshafts and camshafts for the motor industry, or stood at the door of a local iron foundry watching workers fettling raw castings on large pedestal grinders. They were on piece work and it must have been the dirtiest, most tedious job ever imposed on working men. A still- vivid memory was watching men coming home from the day's work, not walking but trudging, utterly worn out and filthy dirty from burnt moulding sand &c. As for me, my dad worked as an electrician at a big bakery and he got me a Saturday job when I was 15 or so sweeping up in the very large despatch area. Can't remember the pay now, but I think it was quite good for the time.