A Look At The Real Hard Times - For A Bit Of Cheer (8 February 1974)

Just after the introduction of decimal currency I had one of the biggest shocks of my life. This was the sight of a youth spilling two or three copper coins from his pocket and just not bothering to pick them up. None of his companions saw fit to do so either. So I bent down and pocketed them myself.

Today’s young people, if they read this column, will probably ask, “So what?” Anyone my age or older will tell them that therein lies the economic difference between ourselves and those fantastically lucky enough to have been born 50 years later.

For us a penny is a penny is a penny. “Look after the pence and the pounds will look after themselves,” has been the economic precept of our lives, if not always followed.

At that young man’s age I was in the fourth year of my five-year apprenticeship and getting the recognised pay for age of 17s. 6d. a week. Everybody, including my schoolmaster, had told me it would be a “bobby’s job” and that I ought to take it (a bobby was then supposed to be one of the higher-paid members of the community and never out of work).

But was it? After completing my apprenticeship my wage or salary (what’s the difference?) shot up from £1 a week to 25s. a week. Actually, this was not as bad as it may seem. At that time all journalists in newspaperland, even after completing their apprenticeships, had to wait until they were 26 before being considered qualified for the full basic union rate and I was not yet 20.

This was near the slumping 1930’s – not long after the 1926 General Strike which began mainly in support of the miners, who had struck not for an increase in wages but against a decrease. It was also at a time when the Daily Chronicle and other newspapers large and small were disappearing on every side.

Eventually came the five lost years of the war, followed by the prospect of a steady job at Bletchley, such as became a now married-man with about £80 capital in his late thirties.

My point in stating all this is that my case has been typical of men nearing my age in many other trades. Early on, I was offered a semi-detached in Bletchley for £1,200. I was being paid more than the union rate, but on the prevailing terms I could no more have accepted the offer than fly to the moon. That is the main reason why today you find a good many heads of departments and the like living in council houses. It was not until a post mortgaging age that they had mortgaging money.

The only sphere in which in recent years wages have not sufficiently outstripped prices seems to have been in house-purchase. Here we oldeys do have a certain amount of sympathy with today’s young people.

At certain times and with certain items there has been no corresponding increase in price at all. For instance, in the 1950’s Mr William Vaughan, and the Fenny newsagent, discovered razor blades he had taken into stock in 1939. The marked retailing price showed that in effect the 1939 customer had paid twice as much for that common article as he was doing 15 or 20 years later.

But to get back to the roofs over heads there has been a lot of talk lately about “fair rents,” a description which in itself begs many questions which I shall not go into, I find it interesting however, that from the end of the war up to recently the talk was more about “economic” rents. It seems therefore, there is now a tacit admission that the “economic” rent is not necessarily the “fair” one.

But from one angle the concept is not at all new. There have been two or three strong surges of council house building in Bletchley and elsewhere. The first happened after the first world war, when council housing was initiated. The next happened after the second world war. At the beginning of this second period Mr. Harry Dimmock, a Bletchley councillor for 39 years, told me that when councils were first faced with building non-profit-making houses for rent there was a lot of discussion about what constituted a fair rent in the light of a tenant’s means. He said they arrived at a general conclusion that a fair figure would be one-fifth of a tenants’s weekly income.

I report this not just for what it might be worth, but because it seems to have been an actual norm from time long past.

And now do I see every council tenant dividing his weekly income by five to find how far his net rent has strayed one way or the other, if indeed, it has strayed at all?

But just to cheer ourselves up, let us all look back on the real hard times. During my early years in Bletchley I reported many golden and diamond weddings of couples who married on a total income of 12s. a week.

You may argue that prices then were so ridiculously low that no comparison can be made. But you would be wrong. Those old gentlemen also told me that after they had provided for the household’s bare necessities of life the most they were able to keep for themselves as pocket money was 6d. 2 1/2p in present nomenclature). ONE TWENTY-FOURTH OF THEIR PAY PACKET!

So now we can really make a comparison. And we can, perhaps, illustrate it most forcibly by asking any husband today who is being paid a net £24 a week how he would get on with which to indulge himself.

Those were the days when on a Friday the working-class housewife sat with her apron outspread to receive the entire wages of the family’s earners before anything was returned as pocket money – a custom in which I took part when I first began working. The fact that it is laughed at today is but another exposure of our comparatively lordly lives.

But did those old-timers normally walk about with long faces? Not on your nelly. Nothing I have ever heard, or read, or seen pictured by contemporaries has told me so. They just looked after their pence.