Earning a Living - 1945

GERMANY CAPITULATES! declared the front page of the Daily Telegraph on V.E. Day, 8 May 1945.

Obviously writers of historical fiction must know the big events which shaped the lives of their characters. How might the characters in a novel have celebrated V. E. Day?

 If in London, might they have been out mingling with the crowds in the streets? Or would they have stayed quietly at home, listening to the King and Mr Churchill on the wireless?


But day to day life goes on, even while great events are taking place. It’s the details of every day life which are of most importance in researching the lives of people in the past.

Page two of the Daily Telegraph on 8 May 1945 carried the Situations Vacant. No doubt many service men and women, hoping to be demobbed before too long, read these advertisements with interest.

There were plenty of opportunities for travelling salesmen, with companies looking forward to post-war development.

A ‘well known West London Dance Hall’ was looking for a General Manager aged between 30 and 40 who ‘must have sound experience in controlling crowds and staff, with a knowledge of accountancy.’

The Isle of Wight County Press wanted a journalist with ‘good provincial experience.’ The post was ‘war temporary’ but could become permanent.   ‘Preferably a disabled ex-service man.’

Despite rationing, there were still opportunities in retail for women. Fortnum and Mason required a junior saleswoman in their perfumery department.

Pontings of Kensington wanted an experienced Corsetiere to ‘live in or out’; in the past women staff of department stores, especially the teenaged apprentices, were often accommodated in the attics above the sales floors.

Other jobs in fashion and retail were advertised by Derry and Toms of Kensington and Netta Gowns Ltd of New Bond Street. At the opposite end of London, Hammerton’s of Green St, Upton Park, wanted a ’Lady Buyer’ for Coats, Gowns and Millinery.

Office work was the other main area of employment for women advertised in the Telegraph. Some advertisements stated ‘5 day week’ or ’No Saturdays’ - a reminder that many offices worked on Saturday mornings.

Posts for office juniors aged 14-16 were plentiful. The girl (or, sometimes, the boy) was wanted as a clerk or copy typist, sometimes to do telephone or switchboard work too. For the girl who wanted something more glamorous than a City office, Warner Bros in Wardour Street were advertising several posts.

One ‘old established firm’ required ‘Junior Girls’ aged 16-18. ‘Preferably secondary education but this not essential.’ Many children remained at their elementary schools until they left when they were fourteen and received no secondary education. It was not until the 1944 Education Act was implemented in 1948 that secondary education was guaranteed for all children, and the school leaving age was raised to fifteen.

More senior positions required shorthand and typing. Some shorthand-typists’ jobs advertised paid £5 a week - a very good wage for the time. Most advertisements however asked applicants to write stating their age, experience and salary required.

Society had been changing throughout the twentieth century, but some advertisements still specified ’Lady Clerk’ or ’Lady Secretary’.

Jobs in domestic service were still advertised, under the heading ’Household’. Mrs J. Mann of Greenacre, Cannon Hill, N.14, wanted a house-parlour maid. She offered £2 15s a week ‘and all found’. There were three in the family. A cook and daily help were also kept.

Local papers, and different daily papers, would advertise different types of jobs. And the type of job advertised changed over time. The 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were probably the heyday of the shorthand typist; in the 1970s audio typing took over from shorthand typing. But the Situations Vacant in a newspaper at any time and place provide a good starting point for a writer developing the background of a character in a historical novel.
　

Oh dear! II

From an article about the plague on the Channel 4 History website:

‘Being exact about the size of the population and mortality (deaths) so long ago is fraught with problems. Although there was a national system of registration of births, marriages and deaths, some families - for reasons of religious dissent or moral conscience - avoided the process.’

This historian evidently knows something the rest of us don’t!

Even the greatest expert can get it wrong sometimes. But this is a fairly fundamental misunderstanding (or at best a very poor explanation) on the part of someone who has an interest in population history.

As every family historian knows, there was no national system of registration in England before 1837. There was parochial registration.  Each of the nine or ten thousand parishes of England kept records individually. They did not record births, marriages and deaths; they registered baptisms, marriages and burials.

The lack of a national system of registration is precisely why reconstructing  the population of England in the past is ‘fraught with problems’!

It doesn't mean that!

‘People died young there, and any man living on it who reached the age of forty could consider himself fortunate indeed’ is how one novelist described a bad street in the East End of London in 1898.

She has made a mistake common to writers and television historians. She is referring to statistics on average life expectancy. Life expectancy at birth in England was indeed around forty for most of the nineteenth century. However, average life expectancy is not the same as age at death.

Average life expectancy was reduced by the very high levels of infant mortality.  In 1899 (by which time levels of infant mortality had begun to fall), sixteen or seventeen out of every hundred babies born died before their first birthdays.

It is true that there were fewer elderly people in the population in the nineteenth century than there are now. Between 1821 and 1901 the proportion of the population of England and Wales aged 65 or over was between five and seven per cent. In the early 21st century it is nearly twenty per cent.

But it is not the case that no, or very few, people lived beyond their thirties and forties.

In Stepney Workhouse in the East End of London in 1881, out of 736 inmates, about 450 were aged 65 or over. Some were over eighty, such as Daniel McCarthy, an 87 year old dock labourer from Cork, and Elizabeth Hennigan, an 86 year old blind washerwoman, born in Bury St Edmunds.

The author of the Census report for 1901 believed that there was a tendency for people, especially the very elderly, to overstate their ages, so that the number of men and women in their eighties recorded in the Census was greater than it should have been. However, a man or woman claiming to be 85 was presumably older than 65, so this overstatement does not distort the proportion of older people in the population.

Some people might have added a few years to their ages when they were young. Many family historians will have encountered ancestors who claimed to be 21 when they were married, who were in fact younger. They might have kept those few extra years throughout their lives.

No-one born in England before the middle of 1837 would have proof of date of birth. He or she might have proof of baptism, but that isn’t the same thing. For most people, the ten yearly Census was the only time they were required to state their age for official purposes. (For marriage, it was only necessary to say that one was ’of full age’.)

Quite possibly, many people genuinely did not know how old they were.