Earning a living

Earning a Living!

At Ipswich’s Northgate School in the 1930s, a particularly dreaded part of the General Schools Certificate Examination that we all took in the fifth form was ‘The French Oral’. An outside examiner would descend on the school to interview each one of us individually…in French!

It was the same examiner every year. He came from Bristol and was referred to by Dr Kerby, our French Master, as ‘the Bristol Doctor’, in much the same tones as those in which one might speak of ‘the Boston Strangler’.

We were carefully coached in the probable course of the interview. He would hand us a picture postcard that we would be asked to describe. I remember that the central feature of mine was a clock tower, and the French word for clock had vanished from my memory! He would ask us a number of questions, one of which was likely to be (I won’t attempt it in French): ‘What do you expect to do when you leave school? The recommended answer, in French of course, was, ‘I am not sure but I expect that I shall become a clerk’.

What a prospect! It wasn’t one that appealed to me, but in the late 1930s few school-leavers were able to ‘choose a career’. Most just looked for a job.

I wanted to be a writer. I had been awarded the top grade in ‘English, language and literature’ in the General Schools Certificate Examination and, praising my essays, my English master had forecast a career in journalism for me. However, shortly before the end of my last term a visiting ‘careers expert’ had warned against just such forecasts and just such ambitions. ‘You’d have very little chance’, he said. ‘You’d be competing with university graduates – and if you went up to London, you certainly wouldn’t earn enough as a trainee to live on’.

Discouraged, I didn’t even enquire if there were any vacancies for trainees with the East Anglian DailyTimes. Probably there weren’t though. Most of Ipswich’s major employers; Ipswich Borough Council, East Suffolk County Council, Churchmans, Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, Ransomes and Rapier, Cranfields Ltd., W.H. Paul Ltd. notified Northgate’s Headmaster when they had vacancies at the end of the school year.

It was in response to just such a notification that, towards the end of July 1937, I presented myself for interview for the post of Junior Clerk at the offices of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department, then in Elm Street, behind the Town Hall. It was a terrifying experience. First I was grilled by Mr Herbert Walton, the Chief Clerk, and then passed on to Dr. A.M. Pringle, Medical Officer of Heal

It was with mixed feelings that I learned that it wasn’t a clerical career that was being offered. If appointed I would be expected to attend Evening Classes in Building Construction and Drawing, Shorthand and Typing while working as a Junior Clerk in the general office, during my first two years in the Department. Then I would be transferred to the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office to receive practical training as a Sanitary Inspector while travelling up to London twice a week to attend an approved course of theoretical training.

Train fairs, course fees and books would cost me about £100 (a vast sum in those days) that the Council would be prepared to loan me, and I would be expected to take and pass the Sanitary Inspectors’ national qualifying examination at the end of the course. If I failed, I was warned, there wouldn’t be a job for me in the Public Health Department.

The starting salary would be seventeen shillings and sixpence (88p) a week but a qualified Sanitary Inspector could expect to earn as much as £350 or even £500 a year. That, in 1937, seemed wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!

I said that I was still keen on the job. It seemed to promise more interest than spending my life sitting in an office, totting up figures and shuffling papers. I might have been even keener had I known that the distinctly unappealing title of Sanitary Inspector would one day be changed to that of Public Health Inspector and ultimately (but after my retirement!) to Environmental Health Officer.

There were, so they said, other school-leavers to interview. A week later, when I had all but abandoned hope, I received a letter from the Medical Officer of Health offering me the post of Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector and asking me to report for work immediately.

Thus I entered the local government service at a time when it was at the very zenith of its power and prestige, as for the past three decades it has been at its nadir. Ipswich was a County Borough, in third millennium new-speak a ‘Unitary Authority’, responsible for all local government services, a vastly wider range of activities than any authority undertakes today.

The town had its own Police, Fire, Education and Highway services.; its own parks, recreation grounds and swimming pools; its own museums, public libraries and its own council housing estates. The council was also responsible for social security and for the Public Assistance Institution or Workhouse. The council supplied gas, electricity and water, provided and ran its own public transport service and was responsible for refuse collection and disposal, street cleansing, sewerage and sewage treatment.

In the field of Public Health, where my foot was on the very lowest rung of the ladder, the Council had comprehensive responsibilities. In the Public Health Department, in addition to Dr. Pringle at the head, there were three qualified medical officers running their own clinics and specialist services; a School Medical Officer (in those days all school children had regular medical inspections); a Maternity and Child Welfare Officer and a Tuberculosis Officer. Professional support staff included School Dental Officers, Sanitary Inspectors, Health Visitors, School Nurses, District Nurses and midwives together, of course, with clerical and manual employees.

The Health Department was responsible for the Borough Maternity Home in Wingfield Street, the Isolation Hospital and Tuberculosis Sanatorium, both in Foxhall Road and the Borough General Hospital (now greatly expanded as Ipswich Hospital), off Woodbridge Road.

My duties were, needless to say, extremely menial. As office junior I had to see that the inkwells (red and black) were clean and full of ink (this was long before ballpoint pens had been thought of!) and that those more important than me, which was just about everybody, had clean blotting paper. I had to answer the phone and, using an old-fashioned manual switchboard, put calls through to other offices in the building. I had to deal with personal callers at the general office counter. I had to stamp, record and post the office mail, and try to keep the post book balanced. And, of course, I had to do any other jobs that I was asked to do.

Office hours were 9.00 a.m. till 5.30 p.m. (or as much later as it took the Medical Officer of Health to sign the Department’s post and get it down to me) with an hour for lunch, from Monday to Friday, and from 9.00 a.m. till 12.00 noon on Saturday. I was granted a fortnight’s holiday a year.

During my second year in the Health department, I was just one rung up the ladder. I still had to undertake some pretty menial tasks but I was in charge of the Registers of Notifiable Infectious Diseases and Minor Infectious Diseases, and of admissions to the Isolation Hospital. Infectious diseases such as Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria, Puerperal Pyrexia or Childbed fever, Poliomyelitis and so on, were sadly common in those days. An Ipswich doctor, wanting a case or suspected case admitted to the Isolation Hospital, would phone the office. I would take the message, phone the hospital to arrange for an ambulance to pick up the patient, and enter the case in the register of admissions


Doctors from outside Ipswich had to contact the Medical Officer of Health of their local Urban or Rural District Council. This Medical Officer then had to phone the office and ask for the patient to be admitted to our hospital – and had to promise, and later confirm in writing, that his authority would accept responsibility for the cost of treatment and nursing care.

This arrangement almost landed me in the most serious trouble of my entire local government career. One lunchtime while I was in the office on my own, the MOH of a neighbouring rural authority phoned to ask if we would accept a case of Scarlet Fever from his district. I took the details, made sure that he accepted financial responsibility, and phoned the case on to the hospital

A couple of hours later a furious Hospital Medical Superintendent phoned Dr Pringle to say that ‘some idiot junior’ (that was me!) had made what could prove to be a lethal mistake. When the ambulance, with blankets and a nurse from the Scarlet Fever Ward, had arrived to pick up the patient, she was found to have, not Scarlet fever but Puerperal Pyrexia. If the unfortunate woman now developed Scarlet Fever on top of her existing infection there would be no doubt as to who would be to blame.

Dr Pringle phoned the Medical Officer of Health who had made the request to me. He claimed that he had of course, known that it was Puerperal Pyrexia and that that was the message he had passed on to me. Who would be likely to accept the word of a seventeen-year-old junior over that of a qualified and experienced doctor?

I spent a sleepless night. Could I have misheard? I was sure that I hadn’t, but no-one was likely to believe me. Supposing the patient did develop Scarlet Fever on top of her Puerperal Pyrexia – and died. I went into the office in the morning pale faced, bleary-eyed and shaking in my shoes as I wondered what fate awaited me.

There, to my unspeakable relief, I found salvation. In the post was a form from the Medical Officer who had phoned me, accepting responsibility for the patient’s maintenance – and describing her as suffering from Scarlet Fever!

Needless to say, I was up the stairs two at a time to Dr, Pringle’s office. He shooed me out of the room before he phoned the Medical Officer in question – but I learned afterwards from his secretary that the conversation was well worth hearing!

In my third year, with my salary pushed up to a splendid twenty-five shillings (£1.25) a week, I was due to go into the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office and to start my training in earnest. It didn’t happen. The year was 1939 and I was a volunteer in the Territorial Army. Called up with the embodiment of the TA the day before war was declared, I didn’t give another thought to public health or local government for the next seven years.
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