What follows is reproduced from a series of letters written by the author to his son, in answer to questions about his early aspirations and assessment of the course of his life in retrospect.

First Five Years

My earliest recollection dates from 1920 when I was aged two and a half years—or it could have been from 1921, at three and a half. We lived in the lower half of what had once been a big house with servants, but now two families occupied it. We had two very large rooms on the ground, or first, floor and the semi-basement that contained a large scullery with a paved floor, a kitchen with a coal-fired range and oven, which was always alight and with a kettle singing on the hob ready to make tea, which everyone, especially my mother and the women of her family, who lived not too far away, seemed to drink in large quantities. The
only light in the kitchen came from a gas-mantle suspended from the centre of the room, over the table, or from candles in candle-holders that we frequently used when my mother inadvertently made a hole or two in the mantle while lighting it. There was a window, but being a semi-basement we got very little real light from it. As well as the scullery and kitchen there were several large cellars. These
were dark mysterious places inhabited by all manner of frightening beasties and giants and things likely to carry me off into the farthest corners of the cellars where I felt I would never to be heard of again. The scullery was a good place to play with plenty of space and a strong, heavy pinewood dresser built in, plus a heavy table in the middle of the room. There was also a long stool with side pieces which I used for all sorts of games. The best one of which was to make it into a boat when the scullery became flooded after a heavy downpour of rain, and the drain outside became blocked. Four or five inches of water would cover the floor. At the back of the house there was a large garden about five of six feet higher than the scullery floor, and quite a catchment in wet weather. We also had a little terrier who lived in a kennel that my father made. His name was Jack and when my mother wasn’t looking I crawled into the kennel with him, it being quite large enough for us both. One day there was a great panic because I couldn’t be found. Apparently, they tracked me down to the kennel where I was found fast asleep with the dog.

Most sculleries had a water-boiler and ours was no exception. On washing day my
mother filled up the boiler to provide the water for washing, a long tedious business. I can still smell the coarse washing soap called Sunlight mixed with steam from the hot water and lines of wet scrubbed clothes hanging inside, in wet weather, to dry. I used to be bathed in a big tin bath in front of the fire in the kitchen. Sometimes—once a week—we used a proper bathroom upstairs. Water in the bathroom was heated by a copper gas-fired geyser which made all sorts of groans and noises and when the water boiled the thing shook and frightened my mother. The two rooms on that floor, opposite the bathroom, were ours. I suppose when the house was owned by some wealthy family they were reception rooms, for they were very high and large. My mother and father slept in one, with me too when I was small. The other was the sitting room where we had parties sometimes, to which all my mother—s relatives came, they who lived about fifteen minutes or so away. Mother said that it was: ‘Big enough for a set of Lancers.’ I never knew what a set of Lancers was—and still don’t.

I have a very hazy recollection of these parties because I was packed off to bed—too young to stay up. My mother and father were young as were all their contemporaries, so I suppose they behaved like any other young husbands and wives did when they got together with music, dancing, and song. I went to sleep anyway!

Large though it was, the garden was divided in two. The tenants in the top of the
house had the end at the top, in which they kept chickens. The henhouses accommodated a large flock of birds. Hens chattered away all day, ruled by a large cockerel of whom I was afraid.

My father was only interested in flowered borders and a lawn. I think he cut the
grass with a pair of shears, for we were too poor to buy a mower. I spent a lot of time playing on the grass out of harms way. My mother was petrified that I would catch scarlet-fever or diphtheria which was the scourge of children in those days before the discovery of penicillin. For that reason I had a very lonely
childhood away from other children until I went to school.

My father was born in 1890—or thereabouts. His father was a signwriter and they lived in Nunhead, near Peckham in South London. I suppose they would have been classed as artisans, for signwriting was a skill for hand and eye in those days. My father showed me a pack of gold-beater’s skin interleaved with sheets of gold leaf between each sheet of skin. I suppose from that, he used to beat out his own gold to embellish the letters on the signs he made.

My father’s name was Walter and he had a brother Albert, and two sisters Edith, the oldest, and Amy, the youngest. Unfortunately, his father, who played cricket, was hit on the head by a ball and subsequently died from a brain tumour. An accident and a disaster, as it was unlikely that, in those days, there would
have been any insurance. State aid did not exist; the alternative was the workhouse. I don’t know the whole story, but, aged eight or nine, my father and his brother were put into an orphanage, probably one of the Dr. Barnardo’s Homes.

My father never talked about the experiences he and his brother endured during the
years of their boyhood; I think they were pretty gruesome. I don’t know either, whether they were in the same orphanage. During his time there, he fell into a copper of boiling water, whilst climbing up to get some bread from a shelf. The skin on his legs was very thin and a knock would break the skin and take a long time to heal. He always had an ulcerated skin which caused him some pain and needed constant attention. I never knew what happened to the rest of the family at that time. I believe that the sisters Edith and Amy stayed with their mother as they were easier for my grandmother to look after. The war years of 1914-1918 I have no record of. I know that both my father and his brother Albert either joined up or were called up. Albert disappeared—reported missing. My father was sent back to work, whether because of his state of health particularly his legs, or whether he was in a reserved occupation of packing case maker for the East India Company; the packing cases were made to measure for the transport of large machinery.

I have just found my mother and father—s marriage certificate. They were married in 1916. My father was 28 and my mother was 22. The information is not complete for the certificate was in pieces, so I pieced it together as far as I was able and had a copy made of the fragments. It showed the year but not the rest
of the date; my father was born in 1888 from that. He was a very determined man, very strong willed, who always said what he meant. He never ever smacked me, for he always said that if couldn’t bring up a child without smacking them he wouldn’t have any. Later on in my infancy he refused to have me sent to Sunday School saying that I should make up my own mind when I was old enough to make such a decision. When I was no longer a baby and was offered choices at meal times, if I said: ‘I don’t mind’ he always replied ‘Have a
mind boy, have a mind!’

Times were very hard then, just before the great recession, and there was a great deal of unemployment. Father was on short time, so money was very short. He managed to get a job as a scene shifter at, I think, the Windmill Theatre. He used to go on to The Windmill after his day job and didn’t get home until
about 2am. He was up early in the morning to get off to the East India Company, so I saw little of him during the week. Often there was a penny bar of chocolate at the side of my bed when I woke up in the morning and for my mother a Lyons chocolate cream bun, which he bought in the Corner House in town, near the theatre. They were a great treat for the cream was thick and real and the chocolate poured over the bun rich and dark.

At about that time radio was on its way in so father made a crystal set and put up an aerial from the tall tree at the bottom of the garden. I have a hazy memory of him climbing the tree from which to hang the aerial. The details escape me but I do remember us all sitting round in silence whilst he tickled the crystal with the cat’s-whisker¹ and the great excitement when something was heard on the earphones. We took it in turns to listen to a rather disembodied voice or some music fading away and back again. Later on he built a Mullard three-valve set driven by a dry grid-battery and a wet high-tension battery which generated the main power supply. I can’t remember the voltage but the battery consisted of a large number of Leclanché cells— small cylinders of zinc filled with dilute sulphuric, each containing a positive pole and joined together positive to negative. I think they created about 110-Volts and needed agitating from time to time to keep the voltage and power up. That was a period of great experimentation with cones for the speaker. Of course, most people at our lowly station in life built their own radio from a blueprint.

The great highlight of the year was the summer holiday which meant a great saving
up over the months before, for pocket money. I think we used to go in June or July—I can’t remember which—but as the great day drew near we couldn’t contain our excitement.

We always went to Southsea to stay with my mother’s aunt Alice who had a house not too far—about fifteen minutes—from the sea. We paid very little for the lodging and shared the cost of the food. We always took a picnic
and spent all day there unless it rained. There was a large grassed area adjacent to the beach where we played rounders on fine evenings. All Mother’s cousins and family came along to play.

We travelled to Southsea by charabanc in those days—the forerunner of the modern motor coach, but much less comfortable. The seats were arranged in sets of five or six across the coach with a door on each side of each row. There must have been eight rows in the open coach. If it rained the coach stopped and we had to help put a canvas cover over the seats to keep us dry. It took over four hours to cover the seventy miles from London to Southsea, along what is now the A3, with a quarter of an hour stop at Hindhead. In those days, the maximum speed in towns was twelve miles per hour and forty miles per hour in the country—much less on minor roads. The fare was only a few shillings but wages were very low—around about £2.10.0 a week in old
money². A railway porter earned about thirty-five shillings a week³

My mother’s family lived in Battersea, about fifteen to twenty minutes walk from our house in Wandsworth Road. They lived in one of a terrace of houses straight off from the street. My mother’s family consisted of my Grandma and Grandpa and her sister Victoria—called Queen, and three brothers, Bert, Walter, and Arthur. Auntie Queen married a South African, whom she met during the war, and went off to South Africa to marry him. She is still alive—nearly a
hundred years old—and living in a nursing home in Johannesburg. My cousin, Audrey, writes to me sometimes. My aunt is senile now but in remarkable health. My grandfather was a foreman in the gasworks at Vauxhall. He used to drink a quart of India Pale Ale with his lunch every day. The ale he bought direct from
a local brewery—two crates—eight bottles a week. I was always a little frightened of him because he used to throw his towel over my head when I came upon him washing at the kitchen sink. I shall always remember him as a thick-set man with a striped flannel shirt, no collar but a collar stud. Heavy trousers held up by a wide leather belt with a large brass buckle and wide braces. When he went off to work he had a white stiff collar and black tie, a waistcoat and a black bowler hat and black boots.

Of the sons, Walter was the eldest and considered as something of a nere-do-well. He had joined up and fought in the first world war when he was underage—and survived. He was married to an Irish girl who was something of a beauty with bright red hair and a fiery temper. Walter was a gas fitter and the story put about in the family was that he adjusted his penny in the slot gasmeter in his home and managed to get free gas. He drove about in a Morris two seater car with buggy at the back that lifted up to reveal two small passenger seats. He was a happy-golucky fellow who got up to all sorts of mischief—but everybody liked him. He eventually emigrated to Australia, never to be heard of again apart from the odd letter.

Nobody liked Arthur. As a child I never knew why, but he was considered to be not too honest and unreliable. He had been in Afghanistan during the war and had all sorts of stories to tell that nobody believed. Bert was the youngest. He worked in the gas company as a bricklayer’s improver, building the great coke oven. He also went to evening classes to study the art of laying bricks using different bonds for different building purposes.

Motley Street was one of a collection of small streets with rows of houses with about five small rooms, an outside toilet, a kitchen and scullery. The streets were very safe to play in, using a lamppost base for a wicket and the odd wall for flicking cigarette cards and toss-halfpenny. People were also very poor. There
was no motorised transport. Most deliveries were made from handcarts or a horse and cart or a handbarrow. The postman called three times a day and the lamplighter came round at dusk to light up the gas street lights. On Sunday the winkle and shrimp man came around with whelks and cockles. The muffin man too,
with a flat tray with muffins piled up. The Italian Oky-Coky man came round in the afternoon with ice cream. They all had their distinctive cries, the any old iron man collecting things people didn’t want.

The grocer’s shop on the corner would sell very small quantities of food loose. Most things were sold from bulk supplies ranged in sacks and boxes around the shop. A halfpence⁴ of jam could be bought if you brought your own saucer, and buying on the slate ’till Friday was very common for those who had no
money. A halfpence of sweets was common and even a farthings-worth⁵ which would buy an ounce of very cheap toffee.

Most peoples’ only aspiration was to survive from one week to the next. In some cases, with some landlords, you were out on the street with your possessions if you didn’t pay the rent.

Class barriers were very strict especially with the working-class. People in those days of the early 1920s were confined to their class by poverty, language, and education, on the whole. The men were the breadwinners and generally provided the money whilst the women looked after the house, meals, and
children. A stoppage of the money supply was disaster.

1922: School Years

Aged five I went to school; by that time my father had taught me to tell the time,
to some extent—I could read a clock, not always correctly. Also, I was beginning to read by the good grace of Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred, the cartoon in the Daily Mirror. Father wrote very well in a good well-formed hand that he encouraged me to emulate.

My school was run by the church in Old Town Clapham on the edge of Clapham Common.
It was about a mile from where we lived, a journey that was made four times daily: to school in the morning, home for lunch at twelve o’clock, back to school by two o’clock, and home at half past three. In those days there were no school meals or transport, so we had to walk, which meant that mother had
to take me and fetch me from school each day, in all weathers. Boys wore knickers and long socks, leaving knees bare. In winter, our skin was chapped and sore, added to this discomfort were the bits of skin knocked off while playing, which increased our misery. Often the sores became infected and pustulated, taking a long time to heal. When I look at our children of today, dressed in their warm, thermal, loose fitting clothes in winter, and loose, cool summer garb, I remember how uncomfortable we were, slaves to an outdated convention. My first teacher, I recall, was Miss Grey who always wore gray; she was large and very strict. I suppose she had to be, there were forty of us crammed into a small room, two to
a desk. All women teachers, in those days, had to be unmarried, so I suppose there was an element of frustrated motherhood about Miss Grey too. In school, there were only two classes as far as I can remember, the first class was composed of children aged from five to six years, and the second of children from
six to seven years. We were issued with a slate and slate pencil and with them spent a great deal of time forming letters. Heaven help us if we dropped a pencil and broke it, for the wrath of Miss Grey would descend upon us. I remember having great difficulty in learning to read phonetically—letter sound by letter—for I could read simple words from word recognition, à la Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred. However, by the time I went to the Primary School, nearby, I could read quite well… and do sums.

Of the time I spent at Primary School, in Macauley Road, I have very little recollection except for the headmaster who was called Little Tich, for he was very short and, for those days, quite kindly. Four or five classrooms were separated by sliding partitions, slid back each morning to make an assembly hall. At school I did quite well even though I spent a lot of time away through ill-health; I had developed a tuberculosis gland in the right side of my neck, it had swollen enough that the doctor wanted it to be removed, but my father hoped to get it dispersed without an operation. Milk was thought to be the cause, which
in those days was unpasteurised and not tuberculin tested. Eventually, I had to go to the Brompton Hospital that specialised in tuberculosis, for an operation to remove the growth—not a pleasant experience, for I was in a long ward with adult men and ruled by a martinet Sister-in-Charge.

Our aspirations were none. School was something we had to do until we were fourteen, when we went to work. There were no pressures to take exams to get on. Getting on was getting a job at fourteen that, one would hope, went on providing until sixty-five, when one retired on a pension if you were lucky, and you could work an allotment and draw your pension each week. There was, during that period, very little movement between classes. People were tied to their social group by language, poverty, expectations, and very rigid divisions—barriers—that were almost impossible to pass. These barriers were enhanced by patterns of behaviour and unwritten rules between the classes. If you broke the rules you could be permanently ostracised and rejected by neighbours and friends within the social group. Of course, in those days there
were no people in one’s group who could put this into words and coherent order. A great number of people were unable to read or write. It was not unusual for some people—particularly in the country—not to have travelled more than a few miles from home.

While at school, I never had any difficulty with the lessons; I could read and do
sums well. At Macauley Road School it was expected that at eleven I would have gone to the grammar school nearby on a scholarship, but on the day of the examination we moved house.

My father had changed his job to that of bus-conductor and was working for a company called Thomas Tilling based on Bromley Common, a very long way from Wandsworth Road. As busses in those days ran most of the night as well as starting at a very early hour in the morning, he spent a long time travelling to
and from work at all hours of the day. It was not until I was a good deal older that I realised what a tremendous effort it must have been for him to spend, probably, an hour to an hour and a half getting to work, doing an eight hour shift, and then spending another hour and a half getting home. An early shift meant that he had to walk a couple of miles to Vauxhall to get the first bus from there to Tilling’s garage. I never heard him complain, for he considered
it was his responsibility to provide for the family.

He managed to find us a house nearby the garage, so we moved. It was a council house, semi-detached. Where, for the first time, we had electric light. We found it miraculous that we could go round switching lights on or off. That was the limit of our electricity. There were no power outlets or electric fires. Cooking was by gas, and a coal boiler in the scullery provided hot water for washing clothes. Water for baths had to be pumped by a hand pump to the bathroom. We all thought how marvellous it was—luxury beyond our wildest dreams. All this in the year 1927. During the ten years of my life there had been great poverty in the land—a general strike— food kitchens set up and widespread unemployment.

I forgot to mention that when I was very small I had my tonsils removed at Tike Street Hospital. Mother took me there in the morning and I remember sitting on a bench with a lot of other small children. We moved along one by one as each child waited his turn to go into the operating theatre, it was a kind of mass production line. They laid me on a red rubber sheet, stuck a mask over my face and
gassed me. The next thing I knew was coming-to in another room with a very sore throat. We went home on the same day. Things were very primitive. Childrens’ teeth were often taken out without the use of either injections or tranquillizers. A visit to the dentist was looked upon with horror.

Re-reading this, it seems as if I have painted a picture of gloom and doom. It certainly wasn’t that, only if compared with our notions of life today.

When we moved to Bromley we had lots of space around us. Good air instead of smog.
Fields and open spaces to enjoy, especially in the summer. Near us were extensive woodlands in which there were hazelnut trees and many of the wild fruits of the seasons. Keston Ponds was but a couple of miles away—a great beauty spot, especially if you could swim. The road to the ponds was lined with horse chestnut trees from which I gathered conkers for great conker battles in the autumn. My
father’s bus sometimes went to a tiny village called Jock’s Bottom where bread was still baked in a primitive oven fired with wood. We had bread from there and it tasted out of this world.

After a relatively short time, we moved house again to another council estate about midway between Bromley and Catford—still within reach of the garage from where the busses set out. This was much better for the environment gave a great deal more open spaces in which to play; the senior school was near too. I was offered a place at the Central School, but again my father refused to let me go, therefore I finished my education at fourteen. I had taken another examination at twelve and the authorities pressed for me to change schools for a longer and more extensive education, but he was not moved.

I suppose I enjoyed school to some extent. Lessons gave me no trouble and, with
another boy, who scored one mark more than me, I became a joint head prefect. Friday afternoons we replenished the teacher’s stock, hid away in the stock room and spent the remainder of the day reading the school prizes. There was the school cricket and football teams in which I played and had plenty to do outside of school. By the time I left school, we had moved house again, but this time within the estate and to a house that was semi-detached. It had a front and back garden which suited my father as he was fond of gardening. Mother was happy in the house, for in those days it had many conveniences. Of course, there was no central heating and we depending on coal for warmth. There was no hot water on tap. As most people in our station of life lived in similar fashion, we didn’t feel greatly inconvenienced. In contrast to the way a lot of people
lived, we felt we were fortunate.

1931: Sweatshop to Plumber’s Mate

On my fourteenth birthday I was given a bike. It was a Hercules and cost £3.19.6, sixpence short of £4. Owning a bike opened new
vistas for me. I could cycle to the open air swimming baths in the summer, and to the library, which was quite a distance away. There were several friends with bikes and we used to cycle about all over the place, taking with us some sandwiches and something to drink. We had very little money, so we had to depend on ourselves for our amusements. Roads were relatively safe. There were few cars and just a few motor coaches. I hailed the end of my school years with great joy. At last I could go to work and earn some money. Also, I was no longer a child at school.

My first job, which I found, was about twenty minutes bicycle-ride from home. It was what was called a sweatshop where young people were employed at low rates on an assembly line. This particular work was winding radio coils on formers. Most people were building two- and three-valve radios, and firms making wireless sets—which were all done by hand—used to order specific coils and windings from firms like the one where I was employed. Our wages were twopence-farthing per hour, about fourteen shillings a week. We worked about forty-eight hours each week and when we did overtime we were paid time and a
quarter. I only spent a short time on the general assembly line before I was transferred to a small department winding experimental coils. This was much better and carried a little more responsibility. I was very proud to go home at
the end of the week an hand my mother my wage packet. She gave me half a crown⁶ pocket money, which went a long way. That job didn’t last long for the firm went bankrupt and closed down.

My next job proved to be quite an education. I found it almost immediately after being laid-off by going to the labour exchange in Lewisham from whence I was sent to a small business that specialised in sheet-metal work related to roofing and copper gas-boilers plus plumbing. The main workshop was in Lewisham, but there was another one in Deptford Broadway where I was sent. Everything was made from sheet zinc that came in rolls of different gauges from nine to eighteen-gauge.
Rainwater downpipes from one and a half to two and a half inches were fashioned from zinc. Pipes were cut flat from the sheets and rolled into pipes in a large press that dealt with eight-foot lengths. I was responsible for running solder along the seam to create the pipe. We made circular freezer tubes out of very heavy eighteen-gauge zinc for the Italian ice-cream vendors most of whom occupied a street nearby. At the workshop there were only three of us, the manager, a craftsman and plumber, and me the workshop boy.

The manager was a grand man—a skilled craftsman—who I helped to operate the great hand-press. I never ever saw him without his bowler hat, a striped flannel shirt and stiff white collar, a waistcoat and dark grey suit,
and a pipe in his mouth smoking away. I learned all sorts of skills there and the need to be accurate. The other man was a plumber and roofer with whom I went to fix gutters, pipes, and plumbing in the neighbourhood. All our tools, cold-chisels, soldering-irons, tea-cans, and such like we made. It would take too long
to describe in detail all the work we did, but, although hard, I found it varied and interesting. My workmates were very patient and seemed pleased to teach me the skills I needed. I think I have them to thank for any ability I have in working with materials and using tools.

At this point my aspiration was to have a job, a wage, and to master what I was doing, for there was something new to cope with every day and more skills to acquire.

1935: New Horizons

When I was aged eighteen, or thereabouts, I left my job as a plumber’s mate and entered an entirely different world. It was a world that would make demands upon my intellect rather than upon my physique, a world in which work did not produce aching muscles and torn and bruised hands—hands that were always calloused. It was a world populated by people who spoke and thought differently
on subjects often outside my experience.

Two or three of my father’s relatives worked as messengers at the Midland Bank, for which the minimum age required for employment was eighteen. It was the through this, my father’s interest, that the Chief Messenger interviewed me at the Head Office in Paultry, near the Bank of England, and accepted me into the messenger service. I remember being sent to Horne Bros., a prestigious tailor, where they measured me for a blue serge suit and warm overcoat, for a raincoat and a silk top-hat. It was a new world for me. I knew that it was a very good job for life, with good wages paid even if I were to be ill. It was such a safe job that they did not require that I pay health or unemployment insurance. Should I require a loan for a house, it was available to members of staff at a minimum
interest rate. In those days, unlike now, prestigious businesses looked after their staff very well.

My first job was at a small branch-bank in the Beckenham Road. We did not start work until nine o’clock in the morning, when the manager arrived resplendent with top-hat on his head, a morning coat over a grey waistcoat
adorned with gold pocket-watch and chain, pin-striped trousers, and spats on his shoes. He was a very pleasant man! This branch of the Midland Bank had a staff of seven people, including the manager and me. I stayed there for more than two years. It was not all that far from home and Beckenham was a small town, rather sleepy and somewhat rural. Other staff consisted of a junior clerk about twenty years old, a ledger-keeper for all ledgers and accounts were kept by hand, two cashiers the junior of which doubled up as a ledger-keeper, an accountant who was a rather stiff man, and the manager. I was the dogsbody. All the staff had been educated in various prestigious colleges such as Dulwich and Alleyns and they
were all studying for the Institute of Bankers exam—except the manager and accountant—as a result, their accent and topics of conversation were quite alien to me.

At age eighteen, I had never used a telephone, believe it or not. Learning fast, therefore, was the name of the game. Very soon they gave me responsibility for the post. I had to keep a postage account. I was shown how to file all the passbooks and credit slips and how to duplicate letters on a damp-clay duplicating
slab. I made tea in the morning and afternoon, and answered the telephone. My job included taking documents of various kinds to customers who lived in the area. Accuracy was the order of the day. At four o’clock in the afternoon the branch closed to the public and the day’s working had to balance exactly. Even if the balance in the daybook was a penny off-balance, we all had to stay and check the day’s working until the error was found. Although
there was a Burroughs mechanical adding machine, most of the adding was done in one’s head and the ledger-keepers could just run a pen down a column of figures and write the total in at the bottom. In addition to the adding machine, the branch did possess a typewriter. Each day we showed all the current account workings written down by hand using pen and ink, in four account-ledgers, mighty
tomes each four inches thick by eighteen inches wide, and twenty-four inches long. Current account passbooks for each customer were brought up to date every day by hand and customers could have their passbook made up to date anytime. At the end of each quarter, we worked late on the quarterly-balance. On the
last day of the year, all the accounts in the branch and account-books had to be brought up to date, and the annual balances struck by midnight—the manager would bring in a crate or two of beer to help us along.

Working at the bank was for me an experience varied and enlightening. It introduced me to a world quite different from that I had occupied hitherto. My recreations changed too. The bank sports and social club was in the area, so I plucked up courage to join. Every weekend in the summer I spent playing tennis and after a while became good enough to play singles for the club team. After tennis on Saturday and Sunday there was dancing in the clubhouse and general conviviality. My horizons began to expand and I could mix more easily with other people.

After two years, or thereabouts, I was transferred to Head Office, which was much
less cozy and personal than the branch bank. As I had some experience of small branches, sometimes I was sent out as a substitute when someone fell ill. However, Head Office was a novelty to me that meant I had to learn more skills. Soon, I was selected to join the walks department, which was much more individualistic. The City of London was split into a number of sections, each known as a walk. My job was to take a number of bills of lading and other documents on a walk, presenting them at various offices, banks, and institutions for payment or acceptance. This took most of my day until half past three o’clock in the afternoon, when it was essential for me to be back at Head Office in time for clearance at the Clearing House in the City, where all cheques,
bills, and such like were cleared. As the value of the bills in any one walk could amount to many thousands of pounds, the Bank would become liable for interest and other high expenses should the clearing be missed. Some of the bills were related to shipping cargoes, so a clearing day missed could mean that loading of a ship could not take place, which could be very expensive. Anyway, I
enjoyed the freedom of being out for most of the day. I met a lot of people doing the same job at other banks and, of course, got to know my way around the lanes and small streets of the City of London very well.

By now, mechanisation was creeping into the offices. The huge quantity of cheques
and documents that the bank needed to store was becoming a headache, so they started to use micro-photography. Cheques and documents were fed into the microfilm machine at the end of the day and they were photographed and reduced to about half the size of a postage stamp. This meant that a roll of microfilm could hold the facsimile of hundreds of cheques. After clearing my walk-documents, I often spent an hour or so microfilming—a very boring job.

1938: Living in the Moment

Upon reaching the age of twenty-one, I had to do a three-year stint of duty, as a nightwatchman in one of the larger city branches. As a job it was pleasant enough for a time, although my evenings were limited by the need to start work at eight o’clock. I had to remain on duty until eight o’clock in the morning of the next day. All branches were fitted with time-clocks, which needed to be punched every hour to ensure that we had not neglected to check security through the night. My programme was flexible as I acted as a relief to the permanent staff when they fell ill or went on holiday. I visited a different branch each night and soon became adept at cutting small keys and manipulating some clocks
with a piece of fine stiff wire to avoid staying awake all night. It was easy work in winter, sitting in the manager’s room with a large fire and a good book. Usually, I made up a bed with a sleeping bag and punched the clock every
hour until eleven o’clock, then I went to sleep until half past six in the morning. Head Office telephoned between one and two o’clock in the morning to check whether all was well. My greatest danger was over-sleeping in the morning, for I had to allow time to punch the clocks of which there were several different types. Each type of clock demanded a different sort of skullduggery. I carried a large-hand two-bell alarum-clock around with me to ensure that I awoke in good time in the morning. The upshot of this was that I needed much less
sleep during the day and could meet friends in the same job and enjoy myself as most young men of twenty-one usually did: swimming, ice skating, playing tennis, dancing, and taking the odd girl out to the cinema. I had no aspirations
and lived for the moment. My job was well-paid for those days and was absolutely
secure for the remainder of my life. War upset the applecart.

1940: War

When I was a small child, I was given a small replica of the Union Jack flag on Empire Day. We all sang Rule, Britannia!. We had been brought up to believe that Great Britain and its Empire were invincible. As a consequence, we all thought that the war would be over very quickly. I was called-up in March 1940 and drafted to the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. Life in the army was a terrible shock to my system. I shall never forget the first day when we had to report to a drill-hall. A large, loud sergeant major formed us into a rough group and we shambled through the streets carrying a multitude of different suitcases, all of us out of step with each other, to the cheers of the
crowds. We were not told where we were going, but the sergeant major kept telling us where we should be going in loud, violent, descriptively colourful language. In the end, we found ourselves at Bognor Regis where we did our basic training. Lord Haw Haw told us where we were on the evening news from Germany. Very good intelligence had the Germans!

We were each issued with a large cloth bag, about the size of a sleeping bag, taken to a cellar in the basement of the house we were in and told to fill the bags with the straw stored in the basement. I slept on my bag for several months. Thus commenced the seeds of my first service aspiration, which was to mitigate life at the bottom. In many ways, I enjoyed the exercises and rigor of much of the
field training, learning how to handle guns and shoot accurately, as well as many other less reputable skills. Also, I learned how futile it all was. In a short time I was promoted to Lance Corporal and I began to learn how to manage groups of men without conflict. It was the experience of being a conscript in the army that provided me with a whole range of skills in man-management, and opened my eyes to the limitations of my own education for there were people from all walks of life with different levels of education and intelligence, all serving side by side.

In our close knit prewar society there was little chance of breaking out into more
advanced fields other than those directly concerned with the job one did. Anyone was subjected to social pressures, who was thought to be having ideas above their station. The war meant that jobs in many walks of life had to be filled somehow. Women, who had limited horizons before, had the opportunity to undertake men’s work, which they did successfully.

1945: New Opportunities

At the end of the six years, we all had to take up our previous occupations, those of us that survived, and many people who had, before army service, no responsibility now refused to accept a subservient role. People such as this undertook further training in new careers. Luckily, because of the loss of life,
there were many opportunities to fill posts in different jobs. I elected to go to college for teacher training and was accepted after an interview in Sheffield. Before being demobilised, I worked for a month at a college in the north, being introduced to philosophy and geography.

Back in civilian life once more, I went back to the Bank to do my pre-war job. Of course, all had changed. All the plum jobs were taken, for one reason or another, by people who had not been called-up. I found that the restrictions were very irksome, so decided to take up the opportunity of working on the land as a farm labourer until I was called to go to college.

Off we went to Steeple Bumpstead where my father-in-law’s family lived. The village was very small and as rural as its name. Mary’s uncle, Don, lived with his family a mile or two out of the village. He had a small transport
business and knew all the farmers around and arranged for me to work for Walter Price, with whom I had to start work at half past six o’clock in the morning. I thought Don was joking, but he wasn’t. At half past six I was in a field hoeing between rows of beet trying to keep up with the other men. We all went home at nine o’clock for breakfast and returned to work at ten. I found interesting the different kinds of farm work I was taught to do, and very healthy. Although food was in short supply in the towns, farm workers had extra
ration vouchers, and we were allowed to have some of whatever it was we were harvesting, so vegetables and potatoes were plentiful. Most of the regular farm labourers kept chicken and geese, and gleaned corn, wheat, and barley after the harvest. Farming was done by hand, mainly, with little mechanisation, which meant that during most of the summer there was work for many people. Some machinery was used to cut and bind the sheaves of corn. Hay was cut by machine and left in the fields to dry in the sun; it had to be turned regularly with a hay fork or it would rot on the ground. When dry, the hay wains would come in drawn by great cart horses to be piled with hay for transport to the stack-yard at the farm. The men showed me how to toss a forkfull of hay onto the wain while a man on the wain distributed the hay, gradually building a pile for transport to the farm. After a while I graduated to loading the wain, which was a skilled job for which I was unprepared; my fellow workers knew that and the sight of my load leaning over like the Tower of Pisa with me precariously balanced on top made them laugh heartily. They tied the load on with rope, hitched up the horse and left me to take it to the farm—farmers have, I think, a peculiar sense of humour.

In all, I enjoyed that summer, which was hot most of the time. I learned many skills to do with farming, and the hard work and plenty of food made me very fit, and my fellow workers excused my initial ineptitude. Mary had a harder time than me, for she had never had to look after a house, a child,—Josephine was
not yet two years old—and cook for a hungry man under very primitive conditions. We had rented a small bungalow in the village. There was no electricity. In common with many parts of Suffolk then, cooking was done on oil
stoves and light was provided by oil lamps. Water was from a well outside the back door. Each morning on my way to work, I used to check the well for dead frogs. We went back to London at the end of the summer before the onset of winter.

After returning to Mary—s family house, I applied to be a War Staff Trainee, so that I could get some school experience before going to college, and to earn some money on which to live. I was sent to Roehampton Church School, on the edge of Wimbledon Common, to begin my training. It was a fortunate placing, for I learned a great deal from experienced teachers, especially how to control forty children in a small room. After spending the winter term at Roehampton,
I left in January for Trent Park Teacher Training College in North London. At Roehampton, the Headmaster kept my post open for my return when I had completed my training and could join his staff permanently.

There isn’t much to say about those early years after the war. I moved reasonably quickly through the system, picking up qualifications as I needed them. At Trent Park Teacher Training College, I was awarded a further two terms of full-time art classes at the Hornsey School of Art, so after returning to
Roehampton I was given leave to go off to Hornsey. Another year of evening classes in pottery, at the Camberwell School of Art, enabled me to develop the pottery skills I had acquired at Hornsey.

After a year or two at Roehampton, an interesting post became available at Linden
Lodge School for the Blind, in Bolingbroke Grove on Wandsworth Common, for which I
applied. Acceptance at Linden Lodge meant a great deal of preparatory work, for it was necessary to become fluent in reading and writing Braille, and in the manipulation of Braille writers and number-type for mathematics; and there was the Teacher’s Diploma of the College of Teachers of the Blind that required at least two years of preparation, and without which one couldn’t continue teaching in the field. Opportunities arose to develop new ideas and skills for the blind that made the work worthwhile, for this I was given much encouragement
from the powers that be.

1958: Lecturer in Education

In 1958, I was accepted for a full-time course, of a year duration, in Child Development, at the University of London Department of Education, giving me the opportunity to do a research project comparing the differences in language between blind and sighted children. My report I presented as my thesis at the
end of the course. A year later, I left Linden Lodge and took a post as lecturer at St. Catherine’s College of Education in Tottenham, which allowed me to work and study in a more academic environment. My colleagues were interesting people with a whole range of expertise across the field of education, and my life
entered another phase varied and interesting. I became an external examiner for the University, which took me and a team of examiners to many colleges during the final term of each academic year.

It was during this period that we bought a house on Hayling Island and Mary went to work at Gorseway Residential School. Eventually, I was persuaded to work at Gorseway too, as Deputy Head Master. It was an interesting and, I suppose, useful
experience, but not what I really wanted. It did serve to get me back with the family full-time rather than just for weekends, though we did have long vacations in college.

A post was advertised as vacant at Bishop Otter College, in Chichester. My application for the job was accepted and it was there I was destined to spend the remainder of my career. Bishop Otter had a very lively, interesting atmosphere in which innovation and forward thinking was actively encouraged. The environs too were stimulating, with fine works of art hung around the walls. I joined at the Easter break as a lecturer—down a grade form senior lecturer. After a month or two, the Principal, Miss Murray, asked me if I would like to work with mature students. Elisabeth Murray was a crafty old thing who knew that I had had
several mature students at St. Catherine’s. When I said ‘yes’, she said: ‘Good—I would like you to design a course for two-year mature students. The college owns an empty school in town that you can use as a base; equip it. You can have a caretaker. Get your course validated at Sussex and start interviewing for well-qualified short-course mature students. You should be able to start the course in the new academic year.’ I can tell you that it
was quite a challenge and I worked very hard through the summer term and most of the holiday interviewing students, preparing courses, arranging schools for school practice, getting out reading lists, and submitting the course objective and structure to the validating body at Sussex University. Authorities like that at Sussex always object to something, so I included one or two sacrificial components for them to throw out, which left me with the main body of the course as I wanted it to be. The course began on schedule in the winter term. By Christmas, I was promoted to Senior Lecturer again. Year by year the course continued. I was promoted again, this time to Principal Lecturer, and I continued to run my courses until I retired in 1977. My time at Bishop Otter provided me with much stimulation and I was given the opportunity to develop several courses for mature students, post graduates, and an in-service course for teachers approved by the Ministry of Education.

Church and State Schools Compared

Reflecting on my career, I must note that Roehampton, St. Catherine’s and Bishop Otter were all church foundations. The Boards of Governors responsible for managing the schools and colleges were dominated by churchmen: a vicar in the case of Roehampton and the appropriate Bishop in the case of St. Catherine’s and Bishop Otter, as chairmen of the Boards. The church was also responsible for the fabric of the buildings it owned. This link with religion had a profound effect on the ethos of the various establishments where a
high proportion of the staff were committed to Christianity, stemming from the fact that religious orders were the sole purveyors of teaching as late as the early nineteenth Century. Even today, Catholics and Moslems are still taught in schools by committed members of staff and managed by religious foundations. Although not religious in any way, I found that these institutions had a far greater sense of purpose and were more caring than any of the State Schools with which I had contact.

Although Bishop Otter was a religious foundation managed by churchmen, the staff
were a very mixed bag of people, with a variety of beliefs or non-beliefs. Miss Murray, the principal, was concerned with the quality of contribution to the college any prospective candidate could make, rather than religious dogma. However, I found that the quality of care which existed in these religious foundations was better by far than any others.

There you have it! A sketch of a pilgrim’s progress—from plumber’s mate to Principal Lecturer in a College of Higher Education. I
forgot about Cameroon in West Africa…. I came home with dysentery.

Afterward

My father was a man of many interests, often hobbies that he pursued disguised as the work he did in education. All his life he was a healthy man. Apart from a touch of tuberculosis when young and having his tonsils removed, he remained fit until he took part in a wartime training exercise as a paratrooper, when an officer mistakenly used arsenical gas instead of smoke. It was a lucky gassing because his platoon was dropped over Arnhem while he was recovering in sick quarters. After regaining his health, he was transferred as a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps. He had a slow heart-rate, which became more erratic as he approached the end of his life, when he needed drugs to regulate his heart and control the cancer of his prostate that was diagnosed when he was in his late seventies.

He enjoyed eighty full years, celebrated fifty years of marriage and
was honored with an eightieth birthday celebration, which was when last I saw him alive. His decline and death was rapid and mercifully short, less than nine
months.

He had a strong sense of his duty to his family. Even at the end he was still fretting about handling the bills and keeping things in order. Even when confused by drugs and not knowing why he was in hospital he was immediately concerned that his wife should get home safely when she said that she had to leave before it got dark, and offered to drive her home and reassured her not to worry.

He always supported his family, financially and emotionally, and rarely lost his
temper. He did his best to watch over us and always had our best interests at heart. He gave his children the rare and precious gift of a safe and happy childhood. He endowed us with the ability to make our separate ways in the world. He was always ready with encouragement and was there when we needed him. And we were not the only ones that he touched, but also all his students and the children that he taught. At the end of his working life he enjoyed another twenty years of retirement pursuing his hobbies and seeing the world around him. He wasn’t perfect, but he seemed to succeed to the Golden Mean: he was neither
rich nor poor. He trod the middle way. He found happiness and contentment. And he
seemed reconciled to his impending dissolution. Nobody could ask more from life: he was rich indeed.

After a difficult period of incontinence and confusion that returned him to hospital after he dislodged his supra-pubic catheter, he there entered a coma and died in peace at half past seven in the evening of Tuesday, 17 March 1998. My father was a good man: the best of men.