Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words. Max Arthur

      Ernest Hugh Haire

      Liverpool impressed us because it was so commercial. A boy coming out of Liverpool Institute, going into a job as an office boy or a junior clerk, would go to a shipping office, an insurance office, a bank or a cotton brokers. Shipping was a big business in Liverpool with Cunard and White Star. The cotton brokers were a tremendous part of Liverpool commerce. They bought the cotton and sold it to the spinners in Lancashire. Myself, when I left Liverpool Institute, I started work for a small private marine insurance company. My father chose it. He had a friend in the church who was a sailing ship owner who recommended me. At first, I was a junior clerk, relaying messages, but then I was sent to the Open Policy Department. There was a great trade between Liverpool and Chile. The ships went out round Cape Horn, taking out manufactured goods, then they brought back guano, bird shit, which was used as a fertiliser. I checked out the policies as each ship came in and I learnt a great deal of geography. But I only earned seven shillings a week.

      Cecil Withers

      I left school at thirteen and went to work for W. H. Smith and Sons, where I was a bookkeeper. I worked in the office of the General Manager, Mr William Smart, in Arundel House in the Strand, opposite the Law Courts. I had to wear a collar with studs and a tie. Every morning, I used to take the number 74 tram from Brockley, which only took twenty-five minutes to get to the office. Sometimes the tram would stop because a horse had gone down ahead. Sometimes a ‘bloody horse’ would slip on the cobbles and cause a stoppage. When that happened, sacks were laid all around so the horse could gain a footing on the road surface.

      Mildred Ransom

      Typewriters were by no means common in offices early in the Nineties, and copying work was still given out to stationers and printers who farmed it out to an army of out-of-elbow writers. When the many advantages of typing over writing dawned on businessmen, their documents were sent as an experiment to a copying office and copying by writing became a thing of the past. Finally, even lawyers gave way and said they had always been in favour of so excellent an invention. So women took premises and fitted them up with typewriters and were kept busy with every variety of work sent in from the aristocratic centres who, though obliged to drop the old-fashioned method of copying by hand, would not install machines of their own.

      The old machines were very unlike those of today. The No. 2 Remington had a serrated bar running along its front, and many is the time I tore the back of my fingers on it while running back the carriage to begin a new line. Torn and bleeding fingers with dirt and oil liberally rubbed into the wounds were an ordinary accompaniment of the day's work till one became expert enough to avoid the snare, and no one ever dreamt of an iodine bottle and no harm ever came of it.

      As years passed, firms everywhere began to fit up their offices with typewriters and to employ girl typists. Systems of filing were introduced, and instead of sending all copying work to be done out of the office, the work was organised so that it could be done inside by the normal staff. With this change, and particularly noting the rapidity with which it grew, it was plain that the period of prosperity in copying offices was passing, as work was only sent to them when the staff had too much to do and had no time to grapple with extra work. To those who could read the signs of the times it was plain that development was necessary. This was the origin of the secretarial schools and colleges. Girls had to be taught secretarial work, and even if every writer, MP and doctor had his own machine, he did not want to be always hammering at it. It paid him better to get a secretary and leave the hammering to her.

      Schools were already in existence to teach shorthand, typing and bookkeeping, and sometimes modern languages, but their students aimed chiefly at clerical commercial work. The parents of girls from better-class schools disliked the milieu of the commercial schools and wished for a more suitable training. Gradually a demand grew and increased for a training which would be wider and better than a mere knowledge of shorthand and typewriting, and secretarial schools offered an educational scheme in which subjects were co-related, and where girls were taught to use in their new work the first-class education that most of them had received.

      I took an engagement under the old London School Board, who appointed me to give a lecture at three evening schools every week. Two were most genteel and respectable and of unvarying dullness. Happy is the nation with no history, and more satisfactory still is the evening school which works hard and has no exciting incident of any kind. The third school made up for both the others in excitement. It had been closed down for a considerable time because of the perfectly awful incidents that occurred. I never could find out what these incidents were, and my inquiries were received with silence and large, circular eyes.

      The school was reopened as an experiment and the entire staff was chosen primarily for their capacity to keep order and for their reputation as disciplinarians. I was deeply flattered when the head of the staff mentioned this, as I had no idea I possessed such a capacity, and it was not long before several of us wished we hadn't … The school was for girls only, which gave us a chance, and the staff was composed both of women and men. The responsible teacher was a woman. A more solidly loyal lot would be impossible to find.

      My first opportunity to exercise discipline was on my first evening, when some of my class turned up unwashed, with hair unbrushed and wearing aprons spattered and soaked with blood. They had come straight from work in local slaughterhouses. None of the class had taken any trouble with their appearance, and the first thing to do was to teach them self-respect under the pretence of learning.

      Success meant that somehow a teacher could hold the wild and wandering attention of his or her class and ultimately make them rule themselves. At first no dodge was omitted; girls pretended to be stone-deaf, to be unable to write – they left in a body if bored and invaded other classes. But they continued to attend.

      One evening my class was tired of me and twenty-three out of twenty-five pupils had walked off to the arithmetic class. They informed the responsible teacher that their mothers absolutely insisted on this, so the unfortunate arithmetic master had a class of nearly fifty irresponsible rowdies instead of his normal trouble. I reported the exodus to the responsible teacher, who put the two Abdiels into the singing class. Thereupon, the singing master reported that he had no pianist and asked if I would play for him. Never have I forgotten that experience. My class promptly defied their mothers and deserted the arithmetic class and arrived, not out of loyalty to me, but to combine with the singing class in making the most appalling remarks that can be imagined. The mildest was that it was a put-up job between myself and the master to hang over the piano together.

      We got over these little things; an extra teacher always patrolled the classes ‘just to make sure’ a teacher wasn't being devoured. Aprons came off, hair was brushed and faces and hands were washed. An immense improvement was noticeable and an inspector came round who was most complimentary. The school began to respect themselves and to modify their language. It was an uphill job, but after six months, when the school closed for the summer, it was a blazing success. Favourite teachers were escorted politely to their bus because ‘the boys round 'ere are a rough lot.’ Pretty manners were no longer greeted with derisive yells – we had progressed.