Andrew Phillips opens up the Colchester Recalled Oral History Archive again to look at jobs, especially the first job of children who left school at 12 or 14 before 1944.

Early interviews by Colchester Recalled include those by people who left school at 12, and lots from those who left at 14, having attended just one school. How did they get their first job? What was it like?

Here’s Ethel Matthews, born 1901, who worked as a living-in servant: “I left school at 12 and went straight into domestic service. We had to start at six in the morning lighting the kitchen fire, cleaning the grate, doing the steps, cleaning the brass, cleaning the windows, washing up and helping with the clothes washing. We worked all day. In the afternoon there would be sewing or ironing to do and then it would be time to get tea ready. When that was finished, I’d have to clear away and wash up, and then get the hot water bottles ready for the beds, and turn the beds down. After that I’d probably have a few minutes for myself and would perhaps read a book or do some sewing before it would be time to get the supper ready. When that was over it was bed.”

Thousands of women and girls worked in Colchester’s large clothing factories, sitting on wooden benches, working industrial sewing machines. If your sister or aunt worked there she got you a job.

Rats scurried under the floorboards and fast moving needles went straight through your finger, but, as one woman said, ‘you thought nothing of it’. The foreman, often a man, was in charge of these very young girls. Here’s Mrs Andrews, who left school at 12: “There was one door for the workers and one for the managers. Well, when I started I just run up the stairs. I didn’t care. And we got a new manager. I didn’t know him. And this man said to me, “What you doing up here?” and I said, “You mind your own business”. Course, I got reported; he found out who I was. But our foreman was mostly on our side. You know what I mean? He was very strict: very strict indeed. But he looked after his girls. And nothing happened.”

The third big job for girls was shop work, a job dominated by men until the First World War, when men went off to fight. Women took over, but needed stamina, patience and courtesy. The hours were very long, particularly on Friday and Saturdays when shops stayed open till as late as 10 o’clock. The only compensation was to have Thursday afternoon off, when shops shut, and Colchester was a ghost town.

Some boys like Joe worked illegally before they were 12.

“When I was still at school I used to work as a lather boy in a barber’s shop. I would go in at 12 o’clock [on Saturday] and I would be working till 11 or 12 o’clock at night and on Sunday. There were no safety razors, only ‘open cut’ and men would have a shave once a week for a penny and I would be lathering one face while he was shaving another. If you didn’t like him, you shoved soap in his mouth.”

Most work for boys and men involved manual labour in Colchester’s large engineering factories, many small building firms, several printing companies, small businesses with offices, and lots of shops, the largest being the chain of stores run by the Co-Op. Men did these jobs because they needed both strength and stamina. Albert King only got a job in 1917 because so many men were in the forces. He went out on East Mill’s steam wagon delivering orders, which he enjoyed, until: “I was then of an age when I could carry. But the type of carrying I had to do was 19 stones of beans [127 kilo], which was twice my weight, on my back up as 20-step ladder into a loft, several times a day.”

Equally demanding was carrying 180 lb sacks of grain up a springing plank to a ship, over and over again, at Colchester’s Hythe. Other jobs at the Hythe were very unpleasant, such as ‘processing’ dead animals: “My dad got me a job at Wombach’s. It was a smelly old job. The intestines of bullocks, sheep and pigs were put into barrels and soaked for about three days until they were soft… They were then run through a machine which cleaned the flesh. It was just the guts that were there and it was known as the ‘Gut Factory’. The fat was bagged up as lard. Nothing was wasted. The [intestine] skins became sausage skins.”

Alf Herbert got a job at 13 as a pipe worker at Colchester’s largest factory, Paxman’s, off Hythe Hill. He recalled: “We started at 6 and had breakfast at 8 in our [work]shop. There was no heating except a brazier at one end which burnt old bits of wood. Sometimes we sneaked in some bacon and fried that up on the coppersmith’s forge. Our foreman would see us from his ‘cage’ and shout ‘I can smell it’. I was a good runner and would shoot down the Hythe to get there before our traction engine, get the best coke and run back. That got me in good favour. When it got dark in winter the men put candles in large metal nuts and worked by their light until we knocked off at 6.”